Downloading and Organizing all Your Past Tweets on Twitter

Psst . . . I’m planning another book. Well, multiple books, but this one’s different than my normal novels. It’ll be a collection of the microfiction (really, really short stories) I write on Twitter.

I wanted to download all my old Tweets and search for ones with specific hashtags so I can easily choose which pieces of microfiction I want to use in my book. It ended up being a much harder task than I expected.

I decided to make a video for anyone else trying to navigate the craziness of archived Tweets on Twitter . . . and for me, next time I try to do this. I don’t want to have to figure it out all over again!

This 21-minute video will show you how to do the following:

  • Download your Twitter archive. In the past, Twitter seems to have let you download a CSV file (which you can open in Microsoft Excel) containing all your Tweets. However, all that was available to me was a JavaScript file called tweet.js, a massive list of gobbledygook. That brings us to the next point on the list.
  • Convert the tweet.js Javascript file to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet. There are ways to do this for free if you know something about using scripts. That’s beyond my expertise, so I used a website, json-csv.com, to convert. Depending on the size of your Twitter archive, this may be free, or it may cost you $10.
  • Organize the Tweets on the CSV/Excel file.
  • Filter the Tweets to view only those containing a hashtag of your choice.
  • Reformat the Tweets within Excel so they show up with the line breaks you originally used in Twitter.

In the end, you’ll end up with a spreadsheet of Tweets you can read through easily.

Screenshot of Twitter archive spreadsheet, sorted by one specific hashtag and formatted with line breaks

These instructions work on Excel 365 for Mac, at least as of today (June 18, 2019).

Here’s the video:

This is the Excel formula you’ll need for inserting line breaks. (See the video for instructions.)

=SUBSTITUTE(G2,”\n”,CHAR(10))

If this blog post helps you, let me know!

Want to be notified every time I post an Author Resource?

Author Resources on my website are 100% free. But if you’d like to buy me a coffee to thank me, click the “Tip Me” button below!