How to Capture Twitter Conversations

By Ashley Poland

Twitter has some built-in tools for tracking the tweets in a conversation, making it easy for you to keep up with every side of Twitter updates. You can link to these using the individual tweet URL, but in order to capture a series of tweets, you'll need to take a screenshot — an image of the content of your screen. Once you've captured a screenshot of that conversation, you can upload it to share with customers on your website or in social media. This allows you to promote online conversation about your services and products to readers who are not on Twitter.

Click the "Expand" link underneath the Tweet you want to view; alternately, if you follow multiple users in a tweet, this link will read "View Conversation." This will expand the tweet view in the middle of your timeline and show any tweets involved in the thread.

Click the date stamp in the upper right corner of any tweet to see that content outside of your timeline view. This shows tweets that came both before and after the tweet you've selected -- so long as they were written as direct replies to the original tweet and are not protected accounts. Copy the URL at the top of the screen to share in online content with a screengrab.

Click the "PrtSc" button (on larger keyboard, spelled out as "Print Screen") to create a screencap; if you use a laptop, you may need to simultaneously press the "Fn" with "PrtSc," depending on your setup. In Windows, this copies the image to your clipboard. If you're using a Mac, click "Shift-Cmd-3" to create a screencap that's saved directly to your laptop as a PNG image file.

Open an image-editing program such as Paint, if you've captured the screengrab from Windows. Press "Ctrl-V" to paste the screencap into the Paint image. To crop the image down so that it only focuses on the tweet, click the "Crop" button, select the section you want to pare the image down to, right-click on the selection and select "Crop."

Save your image in a commonly-used file format, such as JPEG or GIF. This can now be uploaded to any common image-sharing website, from Imgur to Facebook.

Tips

If you just want to share a tweet with your followers, you can retweet it to your followers without bothering to screencap it.

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