How To Find Out WHEN Someone Followed You on Twitter

Special Twitter forensics can reveal the exact day a Twitter follow action took place.

Image by Bob Leggitt - @PlanetBotch

According to ye wondrous interwebz, this can’t be done. But that’s never stopped me in the past. In yet another advanced Twitter forensics first, I’m going to show you, here and now, how to extract actual follow date information from a Twitter follow list. In other words, when your followers followed you. Or when you followed your followers. Or when someone else’s followers followed them.

[UPDATE:2021… In December 2020, Twitter shut down the Legacy Mobile environment, taking the method described in this post with it. If I can find a new method I will update the post, but for now, everything below this paragraph remains for retrospective interest only.]

The app you'll be using is just below, for ease of future access. But if you haven't used it before you'll need to read the rest of the post first…

ID Number:

Calculate Date

Before we get started, I should stress that Twitter does not make this easy. There are multiple steps to the process, and it is an advanced level technique. However, you don't need to be Einstein to do this. There are pictures in the tutorial, and I've made a converter app so you don't have to do any 'workings out'. Once you've learned the process, it's something you'll probably want to keep using, as it's a completely new world of exploration which puts so much previously unseen info at your fingertips. The method is well worth learning in my opinion.

Twitter Detective MasterHack: How To Retrospectively Find A User ID Number

An introduction to the wonderful world of advanced Twitter forensics.

Photo by Yucel Moran on Unsplash

I wrote in my Old Usernames article about the importance of Twitter's User ID in keeping tabs on slippery people's behaviour. The User ID is a unique account identifier which remains the same however many times the user changes his or her @username. If you know the User ID, you will always be able to find a given Twitter profile (or at least find what's happened to it) via its numerical URL.

But what happens if you discover that, say, a group of account @usernames have been switched, and you need to actually prove that the switch has taken place? This can happen with account networks when they try to cloak their origins. And it became important recently when the lead profile in a network of raving political activist accounts rebranded as the main promo feed for an alternative social media platform, claiming to be politically impartial. I know, you couldn't make it up, could you?

"What happened to that original @google account? Has it been repurposed? Let's find out..."

I'm not going to publicise the account in question, but it turned out to have gone through at least six @usernames, and it was originally a promo feed for a pitifully unprofessional "travel site". I wanted, however, to be 100% sure that my old username tracking investigation was entirely accurate. Before I presented the info to anyone else, I needed to be right. And to be absolutely certain, I needed to retrospectively access the User IDs of accounts in the network - as they applied in the past. That would confirm beyond doubt that the usernames had been switched. But how would I get that confirmation?...