Let’s say you’re creating a search stream in your Hootsuite dashboard, to find mentions of the phrase vacation​ holiday getaway​. How do you ensure that the exact phrase gets searched for, rather than the individual words in the phrase?

Using quotation marks around a phrase, like "vacation holiday getaway", tells the search engine to look for that exact sequence of words. This is a standard search operator across many platforms, including Hootsuite streams, ensuring precise results. Without quotation marks, the search would likely return posts containing any of the individual words (vacation, holiday, getaway) in any order, which would be too broad. Boolean operators (like AND, OR, NOT) are used to combine or exclude keywords, not to specify an exact phrase. Asterisks are typically used for wildcard searches (e.g., "vacation") or sometimes for emphasis, but not for exact phrase matching. The "@" symbol is used to mention users, and ampersands are not standard search operators for exact phrases.