How to Copy Old Tweets Onto a New Account
By Andrea Ruiz
An important part of building a strong company presence on Twitter is consistently tweeting quality content. If your company acquires a new Twitter account name, or if you want to move toward using a corporate Twitter account to post about your company instead of your personal account, you may not want to leave your old content behind. You can copy your old tweets to your new account by manually reposting the text to your new account, which is most efficiently accomplished by downloading an archived list of all your old Twitter content. You can also retweet your old tweets so that they display with their original details on your company's new timeline. Twitter provides no way to automate moving tweets to a different account.
Manually
Log in to the Twitter account whose tweets you want to copy.
Click the down arrow next to the gear icon and select "Settings" from the drop-down menu.
Scroll down to the "Your Twitter Archive" section and click the "Request Archive" button. A pop-up box confirms that Twitter is processing your request; click "Close" to close the pop-up box.
Check the email associated with your Twitter account for the download link to your Twitter archive. Twitter may take a few minutes to process your request. Click the download link in the email to visit the download page.
Click the "Download" button to download the ZIP file containing the archive of your tweets.
Unzip the ZIP file and extract the comma-delimited file called "Tweets."
Log out of your first Twitter account, and then log back in to your new account.
Launch your preferred text editor or spreadsheet software and open the downloaded "Tweets" archive in the program.
Scroll to the bottom of the file and locate the first tweet you'd like to copy to your new account.
Copy and paste each of your tweets from the archive as separate new tweets in your new account. Work from the oldest tweet in the archive to the latest, so that they display in your new Twitter timeline in the same order as on your old timeline.
Retweeting
Log in to your new Twitter account and visit your old Twitter profile.
Scroll to the bottom of your old Twitter profile until you find the first tweet you'd like to copy over.
Hover your cursor over the tweet and click the "Retweet" link in the menu that displays below the tweet.
Repeat this step for each tweet you want to copy to your new account, working backwards from the oldest tweet to the newest.
Tips
If you prefer not to download the archive file to use as an easy reference for copying and pasting your old tweets, you can copy your old tweets directly from your old Twitter account. However, because this method doesn't clearly delineate where the tweet's text ends and the account information and date and time information begins, you must ensure with each post that you don't copy any unwanted or extraneous information from each tweet. Also, if your Twitter account has many hundreds of old tweets, you may have to scroll a significant amount to reach the beginning of your Twitter timeline.
When you repost or retweet any tweets containing replies to other Twitter users, those users get new notifications of mentions on Twitter depending on their notification settings. If you don't want your followers or other Twitter users to get new notifications from you, use the manual method only and copy only the tweets that don't have at-replies to other users.
Warnings
Twitter doesn't allow you to backdate or change the time stamp on any new tweets, so the copied tweets won't have the same dates and times on your new Twitter account as they did on your old account.
If you choose to retweet all of your old tweets and you've set the notification settings on your old account to notify you of each retweet, you will receive a separate notification for each tweet that you retweet. Turn off your notifications before you begin by visiting your "Settings" page, clicking the "Email Notifications" tab in the left menu and then unchecking the box next to "My Tweets Are Retweeted." Click the "Save" button at the bottom to save your changes, log out of your old account and then proceed with the steps for retweeting all of your old tweets.
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Writer Bio
Andrea Ruiz has written professionally for blogs, online entertainment magazines and television network websites for more than a decade. Ruiz has also been a web and social media developer, Internet business consultant and computer programmer since 1999, and worked for four years as a professional community manager. Ruiz holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of Massachusetts, Boston.