Twitter recently rolled out a new service that allows users the ability to download their Twitter archive.
Your first reaction, as Cynthia Boris’s was, may be to ask, Why? There are a few reasons why you may want access to your Twitter archive. For starters, if you hire ghosttweeters or people who post to your Twitter account, then you can go back and look at what has been posted in the past. You can use that for training purposes as well as accountability purposes.
You might consider it prudent, after your initial download, to download your Twitter archive monthly so that you can have ongoing training and accountability sessions with your staff and freelancers.
But what if you are sued? Your Twitter archive could prove to be useful in the discovery phase of your lawsuit and could provide your legal team with valuable information they can use in your defense. Of course, they can also use the information to pick out any strengths on the plaintiff’s case and come up with a viable defense against those.
One of the more valuable uses of your Twitter archive might be the diagnosis of larger business problems such as customer service issues. If you notice a large amount of your time being consumed with customer service issues on Twitter, then you could address those problems.
If your sales or traffic numbers are higher or lower on Twitter than on other social networks, then you could also use that to learn how to better effectively use other networks, or improve your Twittering.
I wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking at past tweets, but a Twitter archive could prove useful in a few small ways.
