Twitter is an important part of digital marketing. It’s a noisy, busy, silly place, but getting your content shared across the Twittersphere still counts for search engines. If you do any marketing research (and you should, at least a little) you have probably been frustrated by Twitter’s built in search function. The problem with it is that it doesn’t seem to work especially well. When you try and do some research, you get delivered the newest and most popular Tweets first. If you’re looking to do some historical Tweet research for your Automotive marketing, there is an alternative though. Today, we’d like to share the social search engine, Topsy.

Topsy has digitally poured through the billions of Tweets…and indexed all of them. That’s over 245 BILLION Tweets. They did some scanning and sorting, and now those 425 billion Tweets are available for you to search through. Topsy offers pro tool that has a lot of really robust options (we haven’t used it so we can’t speak for it), but the majority of the Tween data is available to peruse free of charge.

Not only can you search for particular Tweets, you can search for particular Twitter users. If you include “from:username” in your search, you can find all the Tweets by a certain user, including yourself.  By using a self search and sorting by the date, you can find your oldest Tweets, or the oldest Tweets of those that you follow. By searching for a particular Twitter user and a keyword, you can see how they are building strategies around that keyword.

The best part of Topsy is that it appears to be Twitter approved. The Blue Bird Business has already used Topsy to create graphics for their own use, so it’d be pretty hypocritical of them to pull support anytime soon.