5 Free Ways to Archive and Analyze Your Tweets

Your Twitter stream is a moving target. After a couple of weeks, tweets disappear, unrecoverable via Twitter search. Fortunately, if you want to collect, save, and analyze Tweets, there are several alternatives that are freely available.

If you are interested mainly in saving your own Tweets, using Google Reader is perhaps the best alternative. You simply need to locate the RSS feed for your (or anyone else’s Twitter account, if you’d like) and subscribe. Just locate the “Browse for stuff” option under the “All Items” drop down menu in the upper left hand corner of the Google Reader screen, click on “Search”, and enter the username of the Twitter account. The feed will then appear in the search results. Simply click on “Subscribe”, and you’re ready to go! All of the tweets from the account will then be saved from that point forward. This makes your archive of Tweets searchable and pretty much ageless (if you don’t expect Google to be destroyed in the near future).

TwimeMachine is another alternative that will  pull your older tweets into a single web page for you, starting with the most recent. However, it is restricted to you last 3,200 tweets and you can only view 25 at a time.

TwimeMachine

Snap Bird is a more powerful way to search through tweet history. You can use it to view your old tweets dating back several years. You simply enter your Twitter username in the search box and leave the search term blank to get Snap Bird to pull up all of your old tweets. You’ll get a list of 100 tweets to start, and you can continue to go back by 100 tweets at a time.

Snap Bird

The Archivist is the best and most flexible tool for saving and analyzing tweets, structured around searches. The Archivist offers two different ways to save tweets, in an online or desktop version.

The Archivist - Online Version

The online version will archive tweets beginning from the point in time when you initiate a search. It will periodically and automatically update the search based on the amount of activity for the search term. At any time you can observe the most recent tweets and some key statistics about all of the tweets in the archive, including tweet volume over time, top users, the percentage of tweets vs. retweets, top words, top URLs, and top sources. It also offer the opporutnity to make the archive public so that you can share it with colleagues.

Here’s how it works:  First you do a search—using Twitter’s own search syntax (for example, from:yourusername). It will then return a list of matching tweets. Your first search will return a maximum of 500 matching tweets. You can then save that search, which will continue to be updated until you delete it.

There are two problems with the online version. The first is that, since you don’t control when the search is updated, you may lose some of the tweets you want to archive. The second is that, due to Twitter’s terms of service, you cannot export the tweets to archive them in files on your own computer.

Both of these problems can be overcome if you download the desktop version.

The Archivist - Desktop Version

With the desktop version, you gain control over the frequency of the search updates. Once you have started a search, The Archivist will continue to monitor that search term while you leave it open, refreshing itself every ten minutes. You can save the results from your search and reopen it at a later time. Once you save the results to your file system, The Archivist will automatically save any new tweets that come in, so you only need to click save one time.

If you would like to have multiple searches going simultaneously, you can launch multiple instances of The Archivist. However, if you have too many instances of The Archivist open, you could get rate limited by Twitter.

If your search term has a lot of Twitter traffic, you can choose to leave The Archivist running, otherwise there is a chance you will miss some tweets. For example, if you do a search, save the results, close The Archivist and then reopen that search the next day – if there have been more than 1500 tweets since the last time you ran the search, there will be a gap in your archive.

Another convenient feature: if you would like to see the Twitter homepage for a user of a given tweet, you can click their avatar, which will launch a browser that takes you to the person’s Twitter homepage.

Most important of all, if you’d like to perform deeper data analysis, you can export The Archivist data to Excel. When you click Export To Excel, The Archivist will create a tab delimited text file which you can then open in Excel. If you are more tech savvy, you can save the data in an .xml file for further analysis.

The Archivist is a perfect tool for saving, creating a transcript, and analyzing a Twitter chat. If you have created a hashtag for an event, you can collect the tweets about the event to determine more about the attendees and their attitudes about your event than you could from any survey.