How to Create a Useful Twitter Archive

The amount of information we share daily on Twitter is enormous: nowadays we rely on Twitter for sharing our most important updates, streaming our events and conferences, for collecting testimonials, creating group chats, etc.

We rely on Twitter daily for sharing our most important updates and news.

But do you know how unreliable it really is?

First, Twitter search doesn’t actually keep your shares in its index for a long period of time. Twitter used to officially state that they only search through tweets until they get older than about 10 days (I wasn’t able to find this information in the updated documentation. Now they only state that the archive should not be “too old” to be searchable).

Apart from that wicked search indexing limitation, Twitter also has limits as to your personal Tweets. They currently only allow you to see the 3200 of your recent tweets.

Now, imagine you spent a great deal of time and effort promoting your conference hashtag to then go back in time and find that all those valuable tweets are now gone and there’s no way to write a report or collect some valuable testimonials for your upcoming event. In fact, all those tweets are most likely to still exist but there’s no way to find them!

I personally had to deal with such a problem when we ran a Twitter contest a while ago where to participate one needed to Tweet something using the unique hashtag. In a bit over than a week, none of those Tweets was to be found in Twitter search and I had to use Google to select the winner (don’t judge, I was stupid, I know that now).

That being said, this post will show you how to archive Tweets based on various criteria for you to:

• Be able to refer to them later (even in a year or two);
• Enjoy more search options to search through your archives;
• Republish your archives later easily.

1. Google Reader

Any Twitter Search generates an atom feed link that can be used to subscribe to it via your preferred RSS reader. Why Google Reader is preferred in this case?

It’s because Google Reader will archive all the read and unread items starting from the day you subscribed. This makes your archive of Tweets searchable and pretty much ageless (if you don’t expect Google to be destroyed in the nearest future).

So, step 1: Search Twitter:

Step 2: Use the atom link to subscribe to it in Google Reader:

Step 3: Search the Archive any time!

2. TwapperKeeper

I have already mentioned this tool in my post on how event organizers should take advantage of Twitter to help participants connect and keep everyone updated (even those people who couldn’t make it to the event). The tool turned really useful and we even used it internally and were very much impressed by the options (despite the pretty much simplistic interface).

TwapperKeeper is a handy tool that allows to create the permanent archive of all Tweets around any hashtag. With help of this tool, you can create a one-reference source of knowledge exchange around any event.

To create an event, first login with your Twitter account (using Twitter authentication) and then simply provide the hashtag, description and tags:

The best thing about the tool is its great filtering options. Any archive can be sorted by date, filtered by user or a keyword and set to exclude all the Retweets. No matter which sorting and filtering options you choose, you will be able to get the direct URL of the new archive to link to.

Moreover, you can also export your archive to save it locally as an Excel file (which means even more filters and formatting options!). I suggest you do it after your event is over by the way because storing them externally is still risky.

Another great tool that saves any Twitter hashtag archive locally is The Archivist

3. Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

There are a few options to export and archive all your tweets to WordPress (to either share them further with the world or just keep your archive to yourself). The benefits of doing so are obvious:

• You have the full control of what you share: you don’t have to rely on any third-party service in hosting your updates;
• You get the up-to-date searchable archive of your Tweets (backed-up regularly which most hosting services do by default).
• You get the power to save and search your Tweets without any limits.

One of the newest and best options is Ozh’ Tweet Archiver WordPress plugin that enables you to create a cool, branded archive of your Tweets on a separate blog. It only takes you a few seconds to install and run and the output is really impressive:

• Set the update interval;
• (Un)link usernames and hashtags
• Create tags out of your hashtags to better organize and visualize your Tweets:

Have I inspired you to create a Twitter archive?

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