How to Download Historical Tweets Posted on Twitter?

Out of all social media platforms, Twitter is hailed as the most reliable and fastest source of news. Also, since the Twitter audience usually includes working professionals the quality of conversations and content is mature as well. This makes Twitter data highly valuable for research not just for academic institutions and researchers, but also for brands and businesses. Also, since Twitter archives these conversations, you can download historical tweets if and when you need them.

However, downloading historical tweets is a bit complex. If you want access to just your historical tweets archive, you have the option to directly request it. But if you are looking for historical tweets related to a specific hashtag, @mention, or account, the process is a bit tricky and even requires coding experience.

In this article, let’s check out how you can download historical tweets related to any hashtag, keyword, @mention, or account. Let’s dive in.

If you just need to download historical tweets for your account, you can directly request them from Twitter. Here’s how,

• Login into your Twitter account
• Click on the option ‘More’, then click on ‘settings and privacy
• Now under the ‘Your Account’ section, click on ‘Download an archive of your data
• Now click on the request archive option
• As soon as Twitter is done compiling your tweets, you will receive your Twitter archive on the email associated with your Twitter account.

You can now view all your historical tweets from the moment you first sent one. Your tweets can be sorted by month once you’ve downloaded your library of tweets. You can look for specific terms, hashtags, phrases, or usernames you mentioned in your previous tweets. You can also see which tweets have gotten the most attention from your followers by looking at how many people engaged with them.

Researchers, academic students, brands, and businesses often need to download historical tweets for research and analysis. Although, there is no simple way of getting access to these tweets directly from Twitter with just a few clicks.

You will have to integrate the Twitter API and to do so you need coding experience or the necessary resources to do so. Fortunately, there are other options available for people that do not have prior coding experience.

1. Twitter Advanced Search

If you are looking for historical tweets you can use Twitter Advanced Search to do so. It offers various filters using which you can narrow down your search results.

• Words: Here, you can specify the words, phrases, and hashtags related to the tweets you are looking for.
• Accounts: Here, you can specify the account the tweets were posted from, the account to which they replied, and the account that the tweets mention.
• Replies: With this option, you can choose to exclude the original tweets and just look at just the replies.
• Links: With this option, you can choose to look at just the tweets that include a URL.
• Engagement: Here, you can set engagement parameters for the tweets. You can choose to look at tweets that have the specified minimum of replies, likes, and retweets.
• Dates: Using this filter you can narrow down your search results to tweets posted within a specific date range.

Although, with Twitter Advanced Search you can only search and browse through the tweets, not download them. You can manually copy each tweet into an Excel file, but it’s too inefficient, especially for large volumes of tweets.

2. FollowersAnalysis

If you have no coding experience and want to download a large dataset of historical tweets, you can use FollowersAnalysis a third-party Twitter analytics tool.

With the FollowersAnalysis tweet analysis report, you get access to the most 3200 tweets posted by any published by any public Twitter account. It also provides comprehensive analytical PDF reports with valuable metrics and insights.

Although, it also has an option to download more than 3200 tweets. It allows you to download historical tweets related to any hashtag, keyword, @mention, or account for any specified time duration. You also get the tweets in an Excel/CSV file which makes it easier to integrate with analysis tools. However, FollowersAnalysis can also give you PDF analytical reports with analytics insights for the tweets.

Key features of FollowersAnalysis:

• Followers Analysis & Data
• Tweet Analysis & Data
• Download Historical Tweets

FollowersAnalysis does not follow a subscription model, you pay as you go as per your requirements. Click here for a sample report.

Every brand and organization should download and periodically review historical tweets as a valuable source of information and insights. Doing so will help you discover what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. Similarly, if you download historical tweets of your competitors, you can learn from their social media strategy and come up with fresh ways to gain more followers and engagement.