How to export a Twitter list to an Excel spreadsheet
Having created a Google spreadsheet from that dynamically adds follower counts, I wondered if there is a way to create a spreadsheet based on a Twitter list.
The Twitter API no longer allows you to do this but in my search I came across a useful tool for exporting Twitter lists.
TwExList allows you to export a Twitter list into an Excel spreadsheet, and what is particularly useful is that it gives you a summary of data.
For example, you can:
- Analyse follower counts*
- See how active list members are
- See when members joined Twitter
- See the percentage of people who are verified
- Analyse by location
- Analyse by language
*Of course quality is far more important than quality but sorting by follower count can help a social media manager / editor see at a glance if any reporters with a large following are not verified.
I was able to create a spreadsheet from the WSJ staff Twitter list, WSJ accounts Twitter list, WSJ reporters based in EMEA and WSJ reporters based in London.
It’s free to create a spreadsheet from a list with up to 50 members, it costs €0.99 for up to 100 members, €1.99 for a list of up to 500 members, €2.99 for up to 1,000, plus there are options for far larger lists. You can pay by PayPal or credit card.
Don’t be put off by the look and feel of the TwExList site (it looks a bit 1995); it’s an effective way of getting data from a list and well worth a few euro.
You don’t need to have access to the Twitter account that created the list as you can export data from any public Twitter list.
One tip: if you want to pull data on list members, you must copy and paste the url which points to the member list (the one with ‘members’ at the end of the url).
TwExList also allows you to export other data from Twitter.
Related: Here’s how to create a Google spreadsheet with dynamically updating Twitter follower counts
