Whether you’re wondering what you had to say about a particular subject back in the day or wanting to clean up your Twitter history (removing any, ahem, embarrassing tweets you may have sent), there are several ways to go about finding your old tweets. You can even easily find the first tweet you ever sent. Here’s how.
- Use your account email address and password to log into Twitter. If your password is not working, request a new password by entering your email address in our reset form. If our system cannot find your email address, you may be entering the wrong one. I cannot remember the email address I used on my account.
- First, check if you can find your account using your Twitter username by visiting this page. If the username you specified matches a valid Twitter account, you will be presented with an option to submit a support request to Twitter.
Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as 'tweets'. Registered users can post, like and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface or its mobile-device application software ('app'), though the service could also be accessed via SMS before April 2020.
The simple (or not so simple) way to find your old tweets
The simplest but most time-consuming way to find your old tweets is to visit your profile and scroll back to your old tweets in your timeline. If you’re a prolific Twitter user, however, this is a task that could take considerable time. Here at ShareThis, for example, we’ve tweeted more than 5,500 times. That’s a lot of scrolling!
The other hiccup with this method is that Twitter only allows you to scroll back to the past 3,200 tweets, so if you’re like us and have tweeted more than 3,200 times, you won’t be able to manually scroll back to the very beginning of your timeline. So, if you’re in search of your first-ever tweet, the scrolling method won’t work.
Now, if you really want to be thorough, you can request your full archive from Twitter. Go to your Settings, then scroll down to “Content” and click the button that says, “Request your archive.” Twitter will email you a link when your archive is ready to be downloaded. Your archive will include every tweet you’ve sent, including retweets, starting from the beginning.
Using Twitter search to find your old tweets
What if you don’t have time to wait, or the desire to sift through every single tweet you’ve ever sent? Another option is to type from:username into the search bar, which brings up all tweets ever sent from that username. (This is a useful trick if you’re looking for someone else’s old tweets, as well.)
This method brings up a list of your previous tweets, but that’s not the most useful way to go about it if you’re looking for tweets from a certain time or on a particular subject. Adding more search parameters can help you narrow down the results.
How to find old tweets with a date range
If you want to find your old tweets from a specific date range, scrolling through your timeline isn’t the most efficient method. The good news is you’re not limited to using your username in the Twitter search bar – you can add other search parameters, too, including a date range.
Here’s an easy trick for bringing up all tweets sent by a user during a date range:
- Go to the Twitter search bar.
- Type in the following: from:username since:YYYY-MM-DD until: YYYY-MM-DD
- Hit enter (or click the magnifying glass icon in the search bar).
For instance, we typed in the following: from:sharethis since:2017-01-01 until:2018-03-30
Voilà! You now have a complete list of every tweet sent from your username (or any username) between the dates you specified.
One thing to keep in mind: The default view is “Top,” meaning you’re seeing your top tweets from that time period. Click “Latest” in the navigation bar to view those same tweets in reverse-chronological order.
How to find your first tweet
It’s easy to find your first tweet – or any user’s first tweet – using the same method described above. In this case, you need to know when the user joined Twitter. Don’t remember when you joined? Fortunately, this is easy to find on the your profile page:
In the screenshot above, you can see that ShareThis joined Twitter in March 2008. To find ShareThis’ first-ever tweet:
- Go to the Twitter search bar.
- Enter these search parameters: from:sharethis since:2008-03-01 until:2008-03-31
- Hit enter or click the magnifying glass icon in the search bar.
- Click “Latest” in the top navigation bar.
- Scroll to the bottom to find your very first tweet.
That’s it! Our first-ever tweets, from way back in the day:
Using Twitter’s Advanced Search
Twitter also has an Advanced Search tool that makes it easy to conduct date-range searches and find old tweets from your own profile or another user on a particular topic, tweets tagged with a certain location, and even tweets on a topic from several users with a single search.
To use this tool:
- Go to https://twitter.com/search-advanced
- To search by topic, type in your keywords using the available fields. You can search for tweets containing a close match to a word or phrase, tweets containing only an exact match for your specified phrase, or tweets containing specified hashtags.
- To find tweets from specified users, use the “People” fields to find tweets from certain accounts, tweets to specific accounts, or tweets that mention specific accounts. (This is a handy tool if you want to find out what other Twitter users are saying about your brand, for instance.)
- To find tweets tagged with a particular location, such as tweets related to major breaking news, use the “Near this place” field under “Places.”
- If you’re using Advanced Search to find tweets sent during certain dates, use the “Dates” fields to enter the starting and ending date for the period you want to search.
If you want to find your first-ever tweet using Advanced Search, find the date you joined Twitter and enter that date into the “From” and “To” fields. This assumes, of course, that you actually started tweeting on the date you joined. If that’s not the case, you might come up empty-handed unless you expand your date range a bit.
The beauty of the Advanced Search tool is that you can use as few or as many fields as you like, so it’s easy to quickly find tweets on a topic sent on a given day or during a certain week. It’s a great tool for competitive analysis, too. If you’re conducting research for a blog post, evaluating opinions about a product launch, or performing social listening, such as looking for reactions to an industry conference (along with myriad other potential use cases), Twitter’s Advanced Search is your new BFF.
Whether you’ve sent a few dozen tweets or thousands, growing your audience on Twitter is one of the best ways to get more traction from your content. Install the Twitter follow button today to start growing your Twitter audience – it takes just seconds to install, so you can start growing your followers today!
There are a few reasons why you might want to find the email address of a Twitter user. You might want to reach out to them in a more intimate format than a Twitter DM, to pitch a service or to try to hire them. You might want to add them to a database of current leads, or cross-check them with your current leads database to see if they’re already fans.
The trouble is, it’s difficult to find an email address from a Twitter account alone. At least, it’s difficult if you don’t know the various interactions and possibilities you have available to you on the internet. I’ve listed through those various options below.
Before we begin, though, I want to give you a word of caution. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Some people hide their email addresses for a reason. They’ll look on an unsolicited email unfavorably and might block you or report you as spam. In fact, if you’re doing this on a large scale and sending out a lot of unsolicited emails, it’s a good way to get your domain blacklisted as a spammer. If you’re going to harvest email addresses, be careful in how you use them.
1. Look In Their Bio
The first and most obvious thing you can do is just check their user bio on Twitter. You’ll have a pretty low success rate, because the bio is very limited in space, so most people choose to put another more relevant link in place. The only ones that list their email address in their bio are people who really want to be contacted via email, and generally even they have some kind of portfolio they would rather promote.
If they do happen to have their email address publicly listed, you’re in luck. I just wouldn’t count on it. Having a publicly visible email address on a large, frequently-scraped site like Twitter is just begging to have it added to a few million spam email lists.
While that alone isn’t a problem for you, it does bring up the difficulty of actually getting your email seen. If you want to send them a message, and they’re used to getting a hundred spam messages a day, what makes your message stand out as something they want to read? You’ll have to put some thought into techniques to increase open rates and that kind of thing.
2. Visit Their Website
While you’re looking at the user’s bio, you’ll probably see a link to their website. If it’s a social media profile, like a YouTube link, a link to Facebook, LinkedIn, or another social network, skip ahead to option number four.
If, on the other hand, it’s a link to a privately owned website or a profile on something other than a social network, go ahead and click on that link. With luck, you’ll end up on a website that they own. A website the user owns is likely to have a contact page, which is in turn likely to have their email address somewhere on the page. Even if it doesn’t have their email address, it might have other pieces of information that might be just as likely to lead you to where you want to be. It could have their address, their phone number, or even just a contact form you can use to reach out to them. You can run a free Whois check on their domain registration to see which email is tied to that website as well. More on that in the next step.
3. Check Their Website WhoIs
If the website you reach is owned by the person you’re researching, you can take things one step further. Go to the ICANN Whois lookup. This is a tool that gives you information about the person who owns registration over the site you’re looking up.
Find My Twitter Account Link
If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to see the name, address, email address, phone number, and other contact information for the person who owns the domain. However, there are a couple of things that can go wrong.
For example, if you look up this site itself, you’ll see the information is something interesting. The name is Whois Agent, the organization is Domain Protection Services, the mailing address is in Denver, and the contact information is for the domain protection agency. Many website owners have taken to using a domain protection agency to help prevent the risk of fraud. After all, when a fraudster can make a call to GoDaddy with some publicly available information and steal all sorts of resources, it makes sense to hide what you can.
The other potential issue you might run into is that the link is to a website where the user merely contributes. A Forbes author page, a bio at the Huffington Post, that sort of thing. Obviously, the WhoIs lookup isn’t going to show information for one random author on a large site.
4. Visit Their Other Social Profiles
If the user is someone who has several social networks using the same username, you can research them on other sites as well. Twitter might not show an email address, but it’s often easier to get that kind of contact information from Facebook or LinkedIn.
The trouble here comes from whether or not you can actually find the user on another site. Sometimes they don’t have the same username across different social networks. Sometimes, especially in the case of public figures who might be the center of harassment or unwanted attention, those other social accounts are locked down if you’re not already a friend of the person.
5. Google Their Username and Look for Associations
Often, a given user will have accounts on a wide variety of different sites. Many of those sites like to ask users to fill out their profiles full of their contact information. Web forums are some of the best resources for aggregated contact information out there. Run Google searches for their Twitter username, and look for profiles on other sites and forums where the user added their Twitter information as a contact.
In some cases, you can use this to start a chain. If a person has Stardust82 as their Twitter handle (sorry if that’s you, I just made it up for an example and didn’t check), they might have a forum account where they list that as their Twitter handle. Their username on that forum could be something else, though, like WildDragon51. You can then start searching for that username and see what else comes up. Sometimes you’ll be able to find contact information, including email addresses, one or two degrees removed.
6. Use Found.ly or Similar Apps
Found.ly is a contact prospecting app that does a lot of what I’ve talked about above, but automatically. You just upload a list and it will run through various permutation and searches to find related information. For example, you can feed it a list of 100 Twitter usernames, and it will dig around looking for the user’s name, Facebook, LinkedIn, email address, and more.
Found.ly is designed to be a contact management app, rather than just an information digging app, so they have a lot of additional features. You can email them in an intelligent way, automate email follow-ups, manage your replies, see your open rates and your contact history with individuals, and all that. Basically, it’s there to help you keep track of your contacts while giving you additional information about them you can use in your leads database.
7. Use a Site like Spokeo
If Found.ly is a bit intense and more than you want to use, you can use Spokeo. Spokeo is a “people search engine” that aggregates information from various personal directories. What kinds of directories? Anything public, basically. They skin whitepages listings, public records from various government organizations and public websites, and social network information.
Unfortunately, there are two downsides to Spokeo. The first is that it’s not a free service. You can do some free searches to see if you can narrow results down to the right person – it makes no sense to pay for an account if they don’t have results – but in order to actually unlock the information, you need to pay them some cash. $5 per month for a six month membership is the minimum.
The second downside is that there’s no way to search directly from a Twitter handle. You can search by name, and by email address if you have it, but you won’t because that’s what you’re looking for in the first place. You can also search by phone number or street address, but again, you probably don’t have those if you’re going right from a Twitter profile.
This can be fine if the Twitter user has posted their real name, but if they haven’t, you’re out of luck. You can’t search for usernames.
8. Get Them to Authorize an App
There’s one on-Twitter way you can harvest email addresses, but it’s tricky and it’s very much not for everyone. In fact, if you abuse it, Twitter is pretty likely to revoke your access and kill the method if it’s overly abused.
Twitter treats email addresses as a private piece of information and does not give it out publicly. It is information that is only available via an API call from an authorized app. This means that you need to:
- Develop an app that has a component that asks for a user’s email address.
- Write and abide by a terms of service and privacy policy document stating that you will not abuse contact information harvested by your app.
- Ensure the validity of those documents and enable the email address whitelist option.
- Get the app in front of a user and get that user to be willing to actually use the app, and authenticate its use on their profile.
The tricky part here is that you need to, well, develop a whole app. Without the user authorizing the app, you won’t be able to get their email address. Frankly, there are much easier ways to get an email address, and if you have close enough contact with someone that they install your app, you’re past the point where an email address is that helpful. Obviously, this isn’t a practical solution, but it’s worth mentioning since it is still a working method.
9. Use a Permutator and Scan with Sales Navigator
Rob Ousbey from Distilled.net created an automatic email address permutator that works based on the real name of the user. You copy this Google sheet and edit it to use the information you provide. It goes through a bunch of different possible permutations to generate email address options.
Obviously, this only works if the user has their real name available. Note that you can just put “gmail.com” as the domain to get Gmail addresses, or whatever other email client you think they use.
Once you have a list of permutations, obviously you can’t just send messages to all of them. LinkedIn has something called the Sales Navigator, which is a free plugin for Gmail. You can find it here. You’ll want to run through this list of possible email addresses and check each of them with Sales Navigator. The primary function is the ability to tell you if the email address is valid or not; if you find a valid email address, you can then send a contact.
Sales navigator, by the way, used to be known as Rapportive. LinkedIn owned it back when it was under that name, and they just changed the name to roll it into their other corporate tools.
10. Send Them a DM and Ask
So, if all of the above don’t work, or if you don’t want to go through the trouble, there’s always one other thing you can do. Have you considered just… asking them? Just send the user a direct message on Twitter and say “hey, what’s your email address? I’d like to send you a thing.”
Obviously, whether or not they give it to you depends on what you’re offering, who you are, and whether or not they want to give out their contact info. If you’re a brand trying to solicit email addresses for your mailing list, you’ll have a much worse success rate than if you’re a private individual offering coupons or what have you. Still, though, the option is always there. You only have to ask.
Where Is My Twitter Account
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