SEO
How To Easily Search For Tweets By Date On Twitter

One of Twitter’s best features is also the most difficult to find.
Twitter’s advanced search is, ironically enough, not easy to locate. Many people are surprised to learn it even exists
That’s probably because the average user is content with Twitter’s basic search bar.
But you’re here because you’re not satisfied with the basics, are you?
You want to dig deeper. Maybe you want to go back in time and see what was being tweeted about on a specific date.
Or, perhaps you’re curious to uncover everything someone has tweeted about a specific topic.
Twitter has a built-in search function for that.
Its entire archive of public tweets is searchable, making it possible to find anything you’re looking for if you use the right filters.
Want to see what the reactions on Twitter were like when Google launched a major algorithm update? This article will teach you how.
Want to reminisce on your business’s first tweet to see how far you’ve come since then? We’ll go over how to do that as well.
In order to search for tweets within a specific date range, you’ll have to utilize Twitter’s advanced search functionality.
Keep reading to learn how advanced search differs from regular search, followed by some examples of advanced search in action.
How To Use Twitter’s Advanced Search Feature
Twitter’s advanced search feature goes beyond the general search bar, letting you conduct highly specific queries with customizable parameters.
To access this feature, visit Twitter’s advanced search page.
Clicking that link will open advanced search in a pop-over window on the web-based version of Twitter.
Search for tweets by a specific date by scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the pop-over window.
You’ll see fields, like in the image below, with options to add dates to your search.
You can add a range of dates, or just one specific date.

In addition to searching by date, you also have the option to narrow down your search by any of Twitter’s other advanced search options.
Those options include things like:
- Words used in tweets.
- Exact phrases used in tweets.
- Hashtags used in tweets.
- Tweets from a specific account.
- Accounts mentioned in tweets.
- Tweets with links only.
- Amount of engagement (i.e., tweets with a minimum number of replies/likes/retweets).
Here are some examples of searches using these filters.
Example: Find Your First Tweets
Let’s look at an example using several of the advanced search filters in one query.
Longtime Twitter users occasionally find themselves wondering what their first tweets were like and how much engagement they received.
With that said, we’re about to take a trip back in time to look at the first tweets ever published by Search Engine Journal.
First, we must add our Twitter handle in the accounts filter, as shown below.


Next, we’ll add a date filter.
We’ll use the date on our Twitter profile that tells us when we first joined.
Just for fun, we’ll create a date range until the end of the year so we can see all tweets from our first several months on Twitter.
Note: You have to enter a value for the date, month, and year, or else Twitter will disregard the date filter.


Now, the only thing left to do is hit the big “Search” button and see the results.


There it is, folks.
Our first-ever tweet was a news story about an ad partnership between Yahoo and Twitter.
And we received no engagement at all on any of our first tweets.
How times have changed since then.
Example: Find Tweets With Specific Keywords From Specific Accounts
Here’s another example that may be useful.
Let’s say you want to find all tweets from a specific account that contain specific keywords.
You may find yourself wanting to look up what Google has officially stated regarding specific SEO topics.
In this particular example, let’s try to find everything Google’s official Twitter accounts have published regarding core updates.
First, we’ll use the keyword filters.
Consider the ways in which the keywords you’re looking up might be used in tweets.
In this example, our subject might be referred to either as “core update” or “core algorithm update.”
So, we’ll put in “core” and “update” to make sure we catch everything.


Next, we’ll add Google’s official Twitter accounts.
Google has many official accounts, so we’ll only add the ones that are most likely to tweet important information regarding core updates.


From here you can narrow it down even further with engagement and date filters.
We’re going to leave those filters alone for this particular example though.
Here’s what we get after hitting the big “Search” button.


There’s a snapshot of everything tweeted about core updates from Google’s accounts in one place.
Example: Find Your Most Liked Tweets
Another way to utilize Twitter’s advanced search feature is to surface an account’s most-liked tweets.
You can also find tweets by the number of comments and retweets they received, but for the purpose of this example, we’ll just filter by likes.
This can be for your account, or any other public account on Twitter.
Go back to Twitter’s advanced search form, enter the account you want to look up, and then customize the parameters under Engagements.


Perform your search and Twitter will show you all tweets from an account that meet a threshold for the number of likes.
As seen in the example below, every time you conduct a query with advanced search Twitter displays the formula it used in the search bar.
If you want to refine a query without going back to the advanced search form, you can simply change the values in the search bar.


Summary
Those are just a few of the many ways to explore Twitter’s archives with advanced search.
All filters can be used in conjunction. That means you can search by date, or search for most-liked tweets within a date range, or search for tweets with comments that also contain a specific word, and so on.
There are nearly endless combinations of filters you can use to find the exact tweets you need.
Twitter’s advanced search filters are relatively easy to use, but that wasn’t always the case.
You used to have to type in the search operators manually, which required a deep understanding of the way Twitter search works.
Previously, searches by date could be performed by manually adding the “since:” and “until:” operators to your search.
Now, you can simply fill out a form instead of memorizing all the various search commands.
Unfortunately, Twitter’s advanced search isn’t available on the mobile app.
If you’d like to search by date on the mobile app you can still do so the old-fashioned way using the “since:” and “until:” operators.
Or, you can use the mobile browser version of Twitter, which supports advanced search.
Want to learn more about the ins and outs of this powerful search feature?
Read: Everything You Need to Know About Twitter Advanced Search.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Lenka Horavova/Shutterstock
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SEO
How We Used a Video Course to Promote Ahrefs (And Got 500K+ Views)

Creating and selling educational courses can be a lucrative business. But if you already have a product to sell, you can actually use courses as a marketing tool.
Back in 2017, about two years after joining Ahrefs, I decided to create a course on content marketing.
I had a very clear understanding of how an educational course would help me promote Ahrefs.
- People like courses – Folks like Brian Dean and Glen Allsopp were selling theirs for $500 to $2,000 a pop (and rather successfully). So a free course of comparable quality was sure to get attention.
- Courses allow for a deeper connection – You would basically be spending a few hours one on one with your students. And if you managed to win their trust, you’d get an opportunity to promote your product to them.
That was my raw thought process going into this venture.
And I absolutely didn’t expect that the lifespan of my course would be as interesting and nuanced as it turned out to be.
The lessons of my course have generated over 500K+ in total views, brought in mid-five-figures in revenue (without even trying), and turned out to be a very helpful resource for our various marketing purposes.
So here goes the story of my “Blogging for Business” course.
1. The creation
I won’t give you any tips on how to create a successful course (well, maybe just one). There are plenty of resources (courses?) on that topic already.
All I want to say is that my own experience was quite grueling.
The 10 lessons of my course span some 40K words. I have never attempted the feat of writing a book, but I imagine creating such a lengthy course is as close as it gets.
I spent a tremendous amount of time polishing each lesson. The course was going to be free, so it was critical that my content was riveting. If not, people would just bounce from it.
Paid courses are quite different in that sense. You pay money to watch them. So even if the content is boring at times, you’ll persevere anyway to ensure a return on your investment.
When I showed the draft version of the course to my friend, Ali Mese, he gave me a simple yet invaluable tip: “Break your lessons into smaller ones. Make each just three to four minutes long.”
How did I not think of this myself?
Short, “snackable” lessons provide a better sense of completion and progress. You’re also more likely to finish a short lesson without getting distracted by something.
I’m pretty sure that it is because of this simple tip that my course landed this Netflix comparison (i.e., best compliment ever):
2. The strategy
With the prices of similar courses ranging from $500 to $2,000, it was really tempting to make some profit with ours.
I think we had around 15,000 paying customers at Ahrefs at that time (and many more on the free plan). So if just 1% of them bought that course for $1K, that would be an easy $150K to pocket. And then we could keep upselling it to our future customers.
Alternatively, we thought about giving access to the course to our paying customers only.
This might have boosted our sales, since the course was a cool addition to the Ahrefs subscription.
And it could also improve user retention. The course was a great training resource for new employees, which our customers would lose access to if they canceled their Ahrefs subscription.
And yet, releasing it for free as a lead acquisition and lead nurturing play seemed to make a lot more sense than the other two options. So we stuck to that.
3. The waitlist
Teasing something to people before you let them get it seems like one of the fundamental rules of marketing.
- Apple announces new products way before they’re available in stores.
- Movie studios publish trailers of upcoming movies months (sometimes years) before they hit the theaters.
- When you have a surprise for your significant other (or your kids), you can’t help but give them some hints before the reveal.
There’s something about “the wait” and the anticipation that we humans just love to experience.
So while I was toiling away and putting lessons of my course together, we launched a landing page to announce it and collect people’s emails.


In case someone hesitated to leave their email, we had two cool bonuses to nudge them:
- Access to the private Slack community
- Free two-week trial of Ahrefs
The latter appealed to freebie lovers so much that it soon “leaked” to Reddit and BlackHatWorld. In hindsight, this leak was actually a nice (unplanned) promo for the course.
4. The promotion
I don’t remember our exact promotion strategy. But I’m pretty sure it went something like this:
I also added a little “sharing loop” to the welcome email. I asked people to tell their friends about the course, justifying it with the fact that taking the course with others was more fun than doing it alone.
I have no idea how effective that “growth hack” was, but there was no reason not to encourage sharing.
In total, we managed to get some 16,000 people on our waitlist by the day of the course launch.
5. The launch
On a set date, the following email went out to our waitlist:
Did you notice the “note” saying that the videos were only available for free for 30 days? We did that to nudge people to watch them as soon as possible and not save them to the “Watch later” folder.
In retrospect, I wish we had used this angle from the very beginning: “FREE for 30 days. Then $799.”
This would’ve killed two birds with one stone:
- Added an urgency to complete the course as soon as possible
- Made the course more desirable by assigning a specific (and rather high) monetary value to it
(If only we could be as smart about predicting the future as we are about reflecting on the past.)
Once it was live, the course started to promote itself. I was seeing many super flattering tweets:
We then took the most prominent of those tweets and featured them on the course landing page for some social proof. (They’re still there, by the way.)
6. The paywall
Once the 30 days of free access ran out, we added a $799 paywall. And it didn’t take long for the first sale to arrive:
This early luck didn’t push us to focus on selling this course, though. We didn’t invest any effort into promoting it. It was just sitting passively in our Academy with a $799 price tag, and that was it.
And yet, despite the lack of promotion, that course was generating 8-10 sales every month—which were mostly coming from word of mouth.
Thanks to its hefty price, my course soon appeared on some popular websites with pirated courses. And we were actually glad that it did. Because that meant more people would learn about our content and product.
Then some people who were “late to the party” started asking me if I was ever going to reopen the course for free again. This actually seemed like a perfectly reasonable strategy at the time:
7. The giveaways
That $799 price tag also turned my free course into a pretty useful marketing tool. It was a perfect gift for all sorts of giveaways on Twitter, on podcasts, during live talks, and so on.
And whenever we partnered with someone, they were super happy to get a few licenses of the course, which they could give out to their audience.
8. The relaunch
Despite my original plan to update and relaunch this course once a year, I got buried under other work and didn’t manage to find time for it.
And then the pandemic hit.
That’s when we noticed a cool trend. Many companies were providing free access to their premium educational materials. This was done to support the “stay at home” narrative and help people learn new skills.
I think it was SQ who suggested that we should jump on that train with my “Blogging for Business” course. And so we did:
We couldn’t have hoped for a better timing for that relaunch. The buzz was absolutely insane. The announcement tweet alone has generated a staggering 278K+ impressions (not without some paid boosts, of course).
We also went ahead and reposted that course on ProductHunt once again (because why not?).
All in all, that relaunch turned out to be even more successful than the original launch itself.
In the course of their lifespan on Wistia, the 40 video lessons of my course generated a total of 372K plays.




And this isn’t even the end of it.
9. The launch on YouTube
Because the course was now free, it no longer made sense to host it at Wistia. So we uploaded all lessons to YouTube and made them public.
To date, the 41 videos of my course have generated about 187K views on YouTube.
It’s fair to mention that we had around 200,000 subscribers on our channel at the time of publishing my course there. A brand-new channel with no existing subscribers will likely generate fewer views.
10. The relaunch on YouTube [coming soon]
Here’s an interesting observation that both Sam and I made at around the same time.
Many people were publishing their courses on YouTube as a single video spanning a few hours rather than cutting them into individual lessons like we did. And those long videos were generating millions of views!
Like these two, ranking at the top for “learn Python course,” which have 33M and 27M views, respectively:
So we decided to run a test with Sam’s “SEO for Beginners” course. It was originally published on YouTube as 14 standalone video lessons and generated a total of 140K views.
Well, the “single video” version of that same course has blown it out of the water with over 1M views as of today.
I’m sure you can already tell where I’m going with this.
We’re soon going to republish my “Blogging for Business” course on YouTube as a single video. And hopefully, it will perform just as well.
The end
So that’s the story of my “Blogging for Business” course. From the very beginning, it was planned as a promotional tool for Ahrefs. And judging by its performance, I guess it fulfilled its purpose rather successfully.
Don’t get me wrong, though.
The fact that my course was conceived as a promotional tool doesn’t mean that I didn’t pour my heart and soul into it. It was a perfectly genuine and honest attempt to create a super useful educational resource for content marketing newbies.
And I’m still hoping to work on the 2.0 version of it someday. In the past four years, I have accrued quite a bit more content marketing knowledge that I’m keen to share with everyone. So follow me on Twitter, and stay tuned.
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