How to create a list of past tweets with a certain hashtag

By Liz

Pomegranite recently live tweeted (and built the website for) the Alternative Mining Indaba and when I was putting our event report together, I was looking for some great tools to show off our work.

I’d heard about Google’s ‘If This Then That’ tool (IFTTT) which is a FUN thing to play with, both personally and professionally. It’s basically a kitchen for all of your apps and programmes where you create meals from content – even the formulae are called recipes!

What happens when you pull a weather app off the shelf and add a dash of email? Your inbox will let you know when it’s going to rain the next day. How about a Twitter hashtag smothered over a slice Google Drive? You can get a list of every new tweet with a certain hashtag. I got excited about this last one for our analytics but realised it woulnd’t work for ourpurposes because the conference was over and it was too late for the IFTTT recipe.

Never fear! After much research and a little magic, I found another way.

Using Google Sheets to create a list of past tweets with a certain hashtag

1. Open a Google Sheet and select ‘Add-ons’
2. Select ‘Get Add-ons’
3. Search for ‘Twitter Archiver’
4. Install Twitter Archiver
5. Authorize Twitter (Add-ons > Twitter Archiver > Authorize Twitter)
6. Create a Search Rule (Add-ons > Twitter Archiver > Create Search Rule)
7. In the Advanced Rules, place your hashtag and date formula. You can adapt this formula for your purposes #southafrica since:2016-01-01 until:2016-03-01
8. Select ‘Start Tracking’

You’ll see an alert in the bottom right have corner as it pulls up your tweets in the Sheet. Done!