Archive and Save Tweets with TAGS Worksheet

Twitter TAGs is a Google Spreadsheet created by Martin Hawksey to automatically save copies of tweets to a Google Spreadsheet for a specific hashtag or search item.

By collecting this data, the spreadsheet offers a number of ways to view a summary of the activity, including a visualized “Conversation Explorer”. We recommend setting up a new TAGs spreadsheet every time you start a project where participants will communicate via a hashtag.

One important note is that due to limitations of the Twitter API, the TAGs worksheet can only retrieve tweets from about the last 9 days, so it is important to create one of these early in your project.

Setting Up a Twitter TAGs Worksheet

Martin’s site includes a detailed series of instructions for setting up your own Twitter TAGs worksheet. You will need a Google Account to make one.

In these steps you will need to create a “Twitter app” by logging in to https://apps.twitter.com/ with your twitter account. This is what provides the spreadsheet permission to query the twitter database.  The spreadsheet will tell you what you need to enter and retrieve from the app you create.

Once your spreadsheet is set up, I recommend looking under the TAGs menu for the option to Add Summary Sheet and Add Dashboard Sheet for two more ways to review your twitter activity.

If you want to share any of the sheets, use the Google Docs feature Publish to Web under the File menu so you can create a link for visitors to see any of the sheets. The link created as an example is for the published view of the Summary sheet for the UDG Agora Twitter Tags worksheet. Other views include:

• Dashboard Sheet
• Tweet Archive (raw data)
• Conversation Explorer (visualization of activity)

See if you can create a Twitter TAGs worksheet for your own hashtag.

Try Twitter TAGs: https://tags.hawksey.info/

Example for "Archive and Save Tweets with TAGS Worksheet":
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UKqa2LPa80iw8TO2VViGvIOx2lIQ97LQBPzbr-N_kfI/pubhtml