Of all the social media platforms, Twitter is the fastest and simplest platform for sharing your opinions and keeping updated with news and current events. To leverage this appeal, businesses have also flocked to the platform for social media marketing.
However, with 6000 tweets getting posted every second, standing out on Twitter is a mountainous task. Here, tracking and analyzing your past tweets will help you with:
- Pinpointing areas of improvement
- Creating a cohesive brand tone and messaging
- Understand audience evolution
Now, the problem is that Twitter shows only the 3,200 most recent tweets on your profile. And if you use Twitter quite frequently, searching for old tweets becomes very challenging.
However, there are several methods of finding your past tweets, even if they are more than a decade old. These include:
- Twitter’s Advanced Search
- Web Archive tools
- Social Media monitoring tools
In today’s article, we will show you how to use these methods to find and access your past tweets.
But first —
Table of Contents
The need to find old tweets
So why are we emphasizing so much on accessing Twitter’s historical data? What benefits will you get for conducting this seemingly complex process? Let’s find out —
Historical analysis
By accessing your old tweets, marketers can run historical analyses and identify past trends and patterns that drove engagement. It lets you revise your earlier campaigns and identify areas of improvement.
Analyzing your old tweets can also help you understand how your audience has evolved. You can run sentiment analysis on the gathered data to go deep into past audience responses. This way, you can develop predictive models and gauge future trends and market shifts.
By evaluating historical data, brands can also measure how their past content performed, identify strategies that worked, and refine them to suit the current trends. You can also compare periodical data for any annual events or a popular campaign from the past.
Research and data collection
Your Twitter historical data is also a valuable source for collecting and researching customer insights. It helps market researchers study audience demographics, online behavior, and influence.
You can understand how public sentiment and discussions on social issues have evolved and position your campaigns better by collecting and assessing data from old tweets.
Reputation management
Your online reputation can make or break your business — and tracking old tweets is crucial in managing it.
By going through past tweets, you can identify potentially problematic or offensive content and eliminate them. It could include controversial opinions or language that doesn’t align with your organization’s current values. It prevents these tweets from resurfacing and avoids potential PR issues.
Knowing what you did wrong in the past also opens up ways to rectify them. People value brands that take accountability for their actions and do better in the future. By demonstrating a sincere effort to address past problematic tweets, you can rebuild your audience’s trust.
Understanding your past mistakes on Twitter can also be a learning experience and let you make better decisions in the future. You can also keep a consistent brand image through your future campaigns and maintain a unified online presence.
Nostalgia
Our social media profiles document our journey over the years. Accessing your Twitter historical data can take you down memory lane and see how you have evolved as an individual.
If you have only ever used Twitter for your business, accessing old tweets can remind you of your brand-building journey. You can relish your personal or organizational milestones and memories.
So, if nothing else, revisiting your old tweets lets you enjoy a sense of nostalgia. It can be a cathartic process and an excellent opportunity for some self-reflection.
Now that we know the whys of finding your old tweets, let’s get into the process —
Using Twitter’s advanced search to find old tweets
Twitter offers an Advanced Search feature that you can use to find specific tweets from your earlier campaigns. If you are a beginner, the feature may seem overwhelming at first.
To help you here, here’s a breakdown of the whole Advanced Search process:
Accessing advanced search
Log into your account and go to the Advanced Search page. Twitter doesn’t allow advanced search on its mobile app at the moment. So, you will need to use a web browser. You can also use Chrome, as well as a private web browser for enhanced privacy and security, ensuring that your online activities align with the search engine’s safe search guidelines.
You’ll be able to access the advanced search fields as shown in the above screenshot.
Using filters
Add your username to the “From these accounts” field under the Accounts subheading.
Then, add the specific information you can remember about the tweets you’re looking for. Add relevant Twitter historical hashtags, keywords, phrases, and accounts you replied to or mentioned.
Don’t forget to select a specific date range. Twitter lets you go as far back as 2006 — the year of the platform’s origin.
Once done, click on Search. It will bring you a list of your top tweets from that period.
Tips and tricks
Here are some additional tips to make the Advanced Search process more effective:
- If you want to come back to specific search results, just save the added parameters by clicking Save search. Twitter lets its users save up to 25 searches per account.
- Use popular keywords relevant to your industry and see how public opinion has evolved over a specific period.
Finding old tweets with the web archive tool
You can also download an archive of your old tweets through a reliable Web Archiving tool. It’s a savvy way to keep the most important old tweets organized and search the record whenever you need.
What is the web archive?
Web archiving is gathering important content from the World Wide Web and organizing it in an archival format. It eliminates the need to search for valuable information each time and lets you manage the details independently.
You can use this process to generate Twitter historical reports from your past campaigns.
How it works
Here’s how you can use web archiving to retrieve old tweets:
- Log in to your Twitter account. From the left bar, click on More, select “Settings and Support”, and click on “Settings and Privacy”.
- Click on “Download an archive of your data.” The following pop-up will ask you to re-enter your password and choose a verification method.
- Click on “Request archive.”
- It may take a few days for Twitter to prepare your archive. Once done, the platform will send you a notification and an email to update you.
- Click “Download archive” to receive a .zip file of all your past Twitter activity, including all your old tweets.
- Open the file named “Your archive.html.” You’ll see a summary of all your activity on Twitter.
- Click on “Tweets”.
- You will find all your Twitter historical data in reverse chronological order. There will be a search box and filters on the right of the page to help you narrow down your search. You can also use the tabs across the tops to track past retweets and mentions.
Limitations
While Twitter’s Web Archiving Tool comes in handy to organize your Twitter historical data, it has its challenges and limitations. Here are some notable ones:
- Complicated steps
- Takes a few days to generate Twitter historical reports
- Requires you to download the report separately and decrypt the .zip file.
Accessing historical data with Keyhole’s Twitter historical data tool
Generating Twitter historical reports with inbuilt features like Advanced Search and Web Archiving can seem like a cost-effective solution. But in reality, they can be quite tedious and error-prone processes.
Eliminating these complexities, Keyhole offers a simple Twitter Historical Data Tracker. No more waiting for days for your Twitter report to be ready. Keyhole will deliver all your Twitter historical information within a business day.
It will show all relevant data in one comprehensive report, including total posts, users, impressions, and influencers.
Features and benefits
- You can export any Twitter historical hashtags, keywords, and mentions to the Keyhole platform.
- Our software generates reports within 1 business day.
- Keyhole’s Twitter historical data tracker lets you discover hidden insights from past Twitter trends and online conversations without manual effort.
- You don’t even need to subscribe or create an account with Keyhole to generate your historical data reports.
Step-by-step guide
- Go to Keyhole’s Twitter Historical Data Tool.
- Click on the orange button showing “Request Historical Data.”
- It will redirect you to the above form.
- Click on the green “Request Data” button.
Pricing and packages
Keyhole offers flexible pricing to generate Twitter historical data reports. An automatic quote and processing time will be generated before confirming payment. Your Historical data requests will be a one-time cost for a single report.
The charges for a Historical Report start at $50. The final pricing will depend on the number of historical tweet IDs your search will query.
How to delete old tweets from your account
There are several ways you can delete your old tweets. But first, let’s see why you should consider deleting some of your Twitter historical data from time to time.
One of the reasons for tracking your Twitter historical data is to ensure a positive reputation. If you find old tweets that don’t align with your current values or are offensive or politically incorrect, they can resurface and put you in a negative light. To prevent such PR disasters, it’s best to remove those tweets.
Here are some ways you can delete your old tweets:
Manual deletion
You can go through your advanced search results or Twitter historical reports and locate tweets you want to delete. Tap the three dots located at the top right corner of the post. Click on “Delete” from the drop-down menu and click on the red “Delete” button from the following pop-up.
This method is best if you only have a limited number of tweets to delete.
Bulk deletion tools
For extensive Twitter historical information, manual deletion can be quite frustrating and time-consuming. In such cases, it’s best to opt for a reliable bulk tweet deletion tool.
Unlike Twitter, these platforms let you delete all your tweets and likes at once, accelerating the process. You can also clean your tweets by setting specific keywords and times. Some bulk deletion tools also let you schedule automatic tweet deletion after a preset period.
Here are some bulk deletion software you can consider:
- TweetEraser: A web-based tool that lets you import Twitter historical data, apply filters, and delete the results in bulk.
- Soaster: Another popular bulk deletion tool where you can set keywords, usernames, hashtags, and dates, and find and delete tweets that can harm your reputation.
- TweetDelete: A bulk-deletion service where you can remove tweets according to their age or the specific text they include. You can also schedule and automate the deletion process.
Considerations
While deleting some old tweets may be the best way to go, there are some things you need to keep in mind before going through with it:
- If you are using a tool to mass delete your tweets, make sure it’s compliant with all data security regulations.
- Ensure the tweets you delete don’t affect the consistency of your brand image on the platform.
- Deleting a problematic tweet after it resurfaced and gained attention is only going to harm your cause. Instead, focus on crisis management, take accountability, and promise to do better.
Get your Twitter historical data with Keyhole
Twitter can be a goldmine for collecting customer data and understanding audience sentiment. By accessing your Twitter historical data, you can gain valuable insights into user evolution, strategy refinements, and past mistakes.
Here’s a TL;DR version of the methods you can use to find old tweets:
- Use Twitter’s Advanced Search option and use the right keywords, hashtags, and other filters to find relevant tweets
- Save the parameters for search results you want to refer to later
- Using the Web Archiving feature is another practical way to generate your Twitter report
- However, to streamline and automate the entire process, opt for Keyhole’s Twitter Historical data reports.
- Delete tweets that may harm your reputation or don’t align with your current brand image
Finally, ensure your practices are compliant and responsible while accessing Twitter’s historical data.
Looking to get started with better brand monitoring and management? Choose Keyhole today!
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