Social media websites have exploded in popularity over the past decade, attracting users from all over the globe. No social media website has seen as much of a growth in importance as Twitter, with figures as essential as the President of the United States taking to the platform to make statements.
You may be new to the platform or maybe you’ve been there for over a decade. No matter your personal relationship with your handle, you likely still have room to learn some new tricks.
The below Twitter hacks can help to open up possibilities on the website and application that you never dreamed were possible. These tips can be cool, helpful, and downright entertaining. Read on and we’ll walk you through a few of our favorite hacks to use.
1. Create a “Following” List
Let’s face it: the longer you’ve had Twitter, the more your timeline has likely become something on an unreadable mess. Time means following more people, and the more people you follow the more difficult it becomes to keep a coherent looking timeline going.
Luckily, Twitter has a feature that can help you cut through the noise without having to completely unfollow the various accounts and handles you’ve picked up over the years.
It’s called lists, and you may or may not have used the feature before. You can make a new list on Twitter fairly easily by using the shortcut ‘G’ and then ‘L.’ It’s also accessible on your profile page, under the ‘more’ tab.
When you create a list, you’ll be prompted for a name and a description of this list. You can call it whatever you want. After the list has been created, you can then add whichever accounts to it. If you want to be able to turn on Twitter and only seen content from your close friends and family, you can add them to this list and look only at it when you get on the platform.
Many people organize their Twitter in this fashion, grouping the various accounts they follow into differently categorized lists.
You can even check and peek at what lists you’re a part of on other people’s profiles. When on the list page, mouse over to the button that says ‘member of.’ That will give you a look at the public lists that you’ve been added to by others.
2. Harness the Power of Twitter’s Search
A lot of people go to Twitter these days to find information. It can be a place to get the latest news before official outlets have reported, or it can be helpful in finding local happenings near you.
Understanding how best to harness the power of Twitter’s search engine can help you to filter through the millions of tweets on the platform and find what you want to find. There are a lot of options when using the search feature that you may not know about.
Some of the hacks are simple, and you may already be familiar with them from sites like Google. Putting quotations around a phrase will allow you to search only for tweets that contain those words in that order. Putting one word and then a minus prior to another will find tweets with the first word, but will exclude any than also have the second word.
For example: searching for ‘movie suggestions -scary’ will bring up tweets about movie suggestions, but won’t show you anywhere the user suggested something was frightening.
After a keyword, you can also put ‘since:’ and a date if you want to control the time period of the tweets you pull up. You can look between particular dates as well, which can be handy if you want to look back at some of your earliest tweets without having to scroll all the way back to the beginning of your profile.
If you put a question mark after a keyword, you’ll only bring up tweets that contain a question about that keyword. Putting a smile or frown face after a keyword will bring up what Twitter believes to be either positive or negative tweets about the subject matter.
3. Download from Twitter
Twitter is an amazing platform because it contains a wealth of information. What can be frustrating to some users is their inability to access that information and store it elsewhere.
For example, if you want to put some videos you’ve seen on Twitter onto your own hard drive, how do you approach that task? Twitter currently does not allow for video downloading. Instead, you’ll have to use a third-party service like the one outlined at https://setapp.com/how-to/download-twitter-videos-to-your-mac.
Then, downloading videos from the platform can be simple and easy.
While Twitter doesn’t support video downloading, they do support easy downloading of your own Tweets. If you want to keep a personal copy of your Tweets, you can request a full backup download with a few clicks.
Simply go into your profile settings, select your Twitter data, and hit request data. You should get an e-mail confirming your request, and then Twitter should send you a downloadable archive of all of your tweets within the next few hours.
The Very Best Twitter Hacks
If you’re a fan of Twitter, you likely spend a lot of time on the platform. There’s a lot to do and read on there, after all. However, you’re not using the website to its full potential if you don’t take advantage of the above Twitter hacks.
Need more tech advice, tips, and tricks? Keep scrolling our blog for more.