An issue we’ve occasionally had with Twitter #hashtags is the case of a #hashtag showing up when I search on twitter.com but not when I search with the API (or I get a “no posts found” error when trying to add this #hashtag on Juicer.)
Why is this happening.
Unfortunately, it has to do with how twitter indexes their posts.
Twitter only indexes (makes available for search) a small percentage of the total tweets that are posted, and allows you to fetch them with the API.
Since we use the Twitter API here at Juicer what this means is sometimes searching for a #hashtag doesn’t work even though it shows up on twitter.com
Why Not?
Twitter takes a lot of factors into account when deciding what tweets to index, but it seems one of the major ones is time. If it’s been a while since a tweet with a hashtag has been posted, it most likely will not show up in feeds. For example, check out this search on twitter.com. There are lots of posts with that #hashtag, but it doesn’t work when you try to enter it into a Juicer feed. It’s been at least 5 months since the last tweet with that #hashtag, so Twitter doesn’t think it’s worth indexing.
So what should I do?
Well, unfortunately there is not much we can do. We can’t force Twitter to start indexing more tweets.
If you have a paid Juicer account you can manually add posts to your feed. Click “Social Media Sources” on your Juicer dashboard, then click the + button next to your existing twitter hashtag source. Then copy and paste the URL of the tweets you want to show up. You should only have to do this the once.
Otherwise, this may be a blessing in disguise. If a particular #hashtag is not very active then it’s probably not a good idea to have it in your Juicer feed anyways. It certainly wouldn’t lead to a very dynamic feed.
For now the best thing to do is look for alternate #hashtags, or wait until that #hashtag becomes more popular.
Also make sure you are doing everything described here: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-search-not-working
Further Reading
https://twittercommunity.com/t/search-api-tweets-from-not-showing-up-on-search-results/25137
