It goes without saying that Twitter is the biggest social network in the world at the moment, next to the greats like Instagram and Facebook it has maintained a steady influx of new people and made the old ones stay by providing stability and ever-expanding functionality. Just to give you the magnitude of Twitter userbase there are over 140 million active users and over 400 million tweets get sent daily. My comparison with Facebook doesn't stop with just how big Twitter is compared to it, namely, Twitter much like Facebook and every other site out there, to be honest, collects all of the personal data its users supply it with, willingly or not even. But that doesn't mean just us common folk get their data stored, there are also many celebrities out there who share their thoughts, opinions, emotions, and pictures of their private moments with people of the world, their data also gets saved in there.
Now, my exposition doesn't end here, because, we are having this blog made to make people aware of the fact that social media hacking is extremely popular these days, and can you imagine one day losing all the data you have stored on Twitter because some person decided to use a tool to rob you of all of these memories and data.
So, what do I offer as a solution is to use a tool like twtData to download the complete data of your account and data of all of your followers directly to an Excel sheet that you can store offline and be completely safe and protected. This download or backup as we can call it, will contain all the data connected with your account but also complete data of all your followers including their ID, twitter name, their number of tweets, number of followers, their location, their time zone but also some obscure information like is their account translation enabled and even when their accounts were created. This is all extremely important data that can make your life extremely easier if you ever get hacked or decide to monetize your following by having a complete overview of your fanbase and develop ad targeting that is specific to your Twitter demographic, so making a backup of your data regularly can save you from a world of pain.
Now, at this point, you know why it is important to backup your followers and store them safely offline, but now it is time to teach you how to do the actual backup.
Using Third Party Twitter Tools
This probably won't come as a surprise but the internet is full of useful tools that in this way or another get the job done, depending on the scope of the information they can extract from Twitter and how they present you with the data they backup. These tools are all very reliable and will get the job done, but there is no perfect tool for one job, so I'll be listing a couple of them I used in the past that I can recommend with a clear conscience. Now, without further ado let us see which tools you can use to backup your Twitter data safely.
- twtData: This tool easily takes the number one spot on my list with its affordable prices and the sheer amount of data it provides you with. Now, if you wondering just what the extent of their extracting is, let me tell you that it gives you everything Twitter hold on you and your followers on their site. That means that your backup will actually be complete just by using this one single tool, I know I did say that there is probably no one tool that will satisfy all your needs, but that's just because you might need the data presented in some other format than the ones they offer (CSV and XLSX) but I don't see any reason why you would want your data in any other format than these two. Still, you'll be the judge of that, but I heavily recommend them.
Example of the data you receive and how it’s presented can be seen in the image below.
- Watermark: Watermark is a Twitter app which runs in the cloud. Watermark runs in the background so that it can store each tweet from everyone that you are following. Watermark remembers everything so that you can find the tweets you care about. The price of watermark is $4/month.
- Tweet Archivist: In this twitter tool, you can set on what you want to start monitoring on. It will pull as many tweets on anything you searched for. Its price is 3 archives for $14.99/month.
- Tweet Nest: Tweet Nest is a searchable, easily customizable, and browsable archive for all of your tweets. To use this tool, you must have a web server with MySQL 5.0 or later and PHP 5.2 or later. This tool collects all the photos and video thumbnails that you would see on the official Twitter website, including geotagging information, native retweets, and links. This tool is a free and open source software.
- Tweetake: It is a web-based app. Tweetake allows you to take backup of your profile. With this app, you are able to take backup of your follows, the people you follow and all the tweets. You just have to sign in to your Twitter account and then you are ready to take backup of your entire profile. You can also take backup of your selected section, e.g. tweets, following list, followers list, etc. This tool is completely free for use.
- Backupify: This tool protects all of your Facebook and Twitter data. It will automatically make backup of the data and then archives them for you.
There you have it, these tools will prove to be invaluable if you plan on protecting yourself from potential hacks or crashes. Also, keep in mind that the data they extract and backup can be used in a myriad of ways when it comes to twitter advertising and lead generation, but you can find out more about that in our others posts. Until next time.