Pub. 4 2014 Issue 4

12 www.azbankers.org W H EN IT COMES TO ONE OF THE BEST ‘REAL TIME’ SOCIAL PLATFORMS I LIKE TO UTILIZE IN MY INVESTIGATIONS, I still prefer Twitter. To me, this is an instant satisfaction platform. Mean- ing you do not see someone typing out a tweet then holding it for three days before posting. What comes to the users’ minds goes out to the world instantaneously. Users want people to know when they are at work, when they are hungry, what they ate for lunch or dinner, where they work out, where they hang out for happy hour, their political views, religious views and even when they have ‘checked in’ to their bed at home. Most of it seems crazy to me; however, it does give us the ability to create profiles. Recently BING came out with a new search function to help in locating tweets. I feel I must point out that I have been conducting these searches on Google already. However, the differ- ence in results may come from the fact that Bing has partnered with Twitter to assist in a better search platform. As I have talked about in my classes and in a previous article, one of the things that you need to understand the importance of is hashtags. A hashtag is # - (what we used to know as the pound sign). Simply put, a hashtag is a topic of content. They were originally most associated with Twitter but now can be found on numerous platforms includ- ing but in no way limited to: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google + and A New Way to Search Tweets By MICHELE STUART, JAG Investigations, Inc. the popular video platform of Vine. Hashtags give us the ability to also start to develop relationships between people. Bing has now promoted Twitter searches by allowing you to search via a hashtag. The results will then be listed as a normal search result but now include a small Twitter icon next the results. The results will now provide additional information such as the tweet, when the tweet was tweeted and who tweeted it. Also always remember to search the Twitter handles in three specific forms: 1. MSJAG (username) 2. @MSJAG (when someone speaks TO the that username) 3. #MSJAG (when someone talks ABOUT that username) Furthermore, Bing looks at statistical information on tweets to determine the best results based on when the tweet was posted, tweet quality, how many times it was retweeted and verified status. Remember Bing isn’t just now teamed up with Twitter – they teamed up with Facebook also allowing for search capa- bilities that are immediate and defaulted through the Facebook Graph Search. Additionally, there are specific search engines that have been created to search hashtags over multiple social platforms. One such source for hashtag research is www.tagboard.com. This site pro- vides numerous results from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Google + and Flicker. A cool aspect of this site is once a profile is found associated to the hashtag it becomes interactive, allowing you to click on the username affiliated to the profile and it will then direct you to their profile. A second source is www.hashatit.com which searches Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Happy hunting! w