Do you know that Twitter has a feature which can be used to Request your Twitter Archive? If the answer is no then go through this guide to know about Twitter Archive feature and how to request and download Twitter archive. You will also get to know how to use Twitter Archive once you have it.
Contents
What is Twitter Archive?
Twitter Archive is a feature which was launched back in 2012. Twitter Archive allows you to request your all time Tweet history. Tweet Archive contains the following information.
1. Tweet Archive contains all the tweets shared by you till date.
2. It includes all the retweets sent from your Account.
3. All the tweets/retweets are grouped by years and are further categorized under months.
Twitter Archive is basically a collection of all your Tweets and Retweets which is presented to you in an organized way.
Now, let us go ahead and learn how to request and download Twitter Archive.
Download Twitter Archive
1. Go to Twitter Website and log in using your Twitter credentials.
2. Click on your Profile picture at the top right corner and select Settings.
3. Under Settings, Click on Your Twitter Data on the left sidebar.
4. As this is something sensitive, hence Twitter will request to enter your Twitter password to proceed. Enter password and click Confirm.
5. Scroll down in the next screen and Click on Twitter Archive under Other data.
6. Next, Click on Request your archive button.
Now, you will have to wait until Twitter gets your Tweet history ready. The time taken will depend on the number of tweets you have published. For my personal account, it hardly took 1 minute to get the Email with the archive download link.
7. You will receive a link a to download a zip file containing your Twitter archive on the Email id linked to your Twitter account.
Click on Download now button in the Email which will take you to your Twitter account if you are logged in already. Log in if you are logged out of your account.
8. Finally, click Download to start downloading the Archive zip file.
Contents of Twitter Archive zip folder
On extracting the zip folder (here’s how to do it on iPhone) you will find the following files.
1. The file in which you should be interested is index.html. On opening this file in your browser you can easily use and browse through your Tweets.
2. tweets.csv file is for tools which perform data analysis and for developers.
The other folders like css, data etc. contain data and information which is necessary for index.html file to work.
How to use Twitter Archive?
Open index.html file in your browser. On opening the file, all the Tweets for the latest months will be shown. The main operations you can perform are favoriting or replying to your tweet which is not that useful.
However, you can use the Twitter bird icon at the top right corner or click on View on Twitter below every tweet to go to that Tweet. This is useful because you can easily navigate to an old tweet and perform operations like delete, embed etc. on it.
Apart from that, you can use the chart which shows month wise bars grouped in yearly order. Hover, on a particular bar to know the number of tweets for that particular month. You can even click on the bar of a month to load all the tweets for that specific month.
You may also make use of left/right arrows to navigate to previous/next month’s tweet respectively.
Twitter Archive Search
One of the most important functionality of Twitter archives is that they allow you to search tweets using hashtags, keywords, phrases and usernames. Have a look at the below image where I searched for gadgets hashtag.
In this way, you can figure, how many tweets were published for a particular hashtag and analyze whether it goes with your targets/requirements. It really is a useful feature for marketers.
Here are a couple of Twitter tutorials which will help you in managing your Twitter account.
1. How to Disable Direct Messages on Twitter
2. Send automated direct messages on Twitter
This was all I had to share about Twitter archives. We hope that you were able to request your Twitter archives using this tutorial. Share it on your favorite social media platform if you found it helpful.
