Oprah Winfrey granted pop superstardom in April not to another fraudulent memoirist, but to Twitter, the online social network that has lured both Hollywood celebrities and basement amateurs away from their blogs. Though a rage on Internet since 2006, Twittermania has only begun. In the days after Oprah’s show, Twitter’s traffic growth is accelerating. The ratings service HitWise now ranks twitter.com as America’s No. 38 website.

Because it is kept simple, most users figure out Twitter quickly. If you began tweeting the day of Oprah’s show, it’s a safe bet you already know how to DM a private message to a friend, and how to RT a joke worth retweeting. You search for #swineflu every few hours, and know it is called a hashtag. You’ve learned how to follow Demi Moore and block online marketers.

Assuming you’ve got these basics down, there are many less obvious tips and tweaks to get more from tweeting.

Advanced search

Twitter has some powerful search options, but good luck trying to find them. If you use the search box built into Twitter’s Web interface, it won’t tell you there is also an advanced search tool, and special characters—”operators” in search jargon—that you can use to search for, say, “Bush OR Cheney since: 2009-01-20”. To find the advanced search, scroll to the bottom of any page at twitter.com and look for the link “search” hiding there. Click it and you’ll be taken to search.twitter.com. Click the advanced search link. I suggest bookmarking the page on your browser. There’s another link there that lists all search operators, like “within:10mi.”

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