Social Media: Tarleton Tip Thursday #2 (Twitter)

Welcome back to Tarleton Tip Thursdays, where every week we give you tips to help you harness the power of social media. Last week's tip discussed how to follow professional conferences on Twitter in real time without signing up for an account. (Hint: use the conference hash tag).

This week, as promised, we'll discuss how to archive, or permanently save, your conference tweets.

You can sign up for a free account with HootSuite, a social media monitoring service.  Here are directions on how to create an archive. Or,  several days before the conference begins, you can try using The Archivist, a service that can save tweets online or to your desktop. 

What if you'd like to save your day to day tweets?   There are several services that will do this for you. Note: Your tweets must be publicly accessible to use these services.

Attend conferences virtually with Twitter (image obtained with permission from morguefile.com).

Twistory, allows you to archive your tweets for the last 30 days for free (for $1 a month, you can export your tweets into your Outlook or Google calendar). Or you can try Backupify, which will allow you to save up to 3 social media accounts (including Twitter and Facebook) for free.  Both services have paid account subscriptions that increase your options.

We hope you found this post helpful.  Share your opinion--do you think the ability to archive tweets and/or hashtags will ever come in handy?

And, as always, don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!


Yvonne Mulhern is a librarian at Tarleton State University and a co-director of the Texas Social Media Research Institute.