The beginning of each person’s time on Twitter is always interesting.
Between the funny tweets trying to figure the platform out to the downright embarrassing ways we used to act, many of us have forgotten about the first posts we’ve ever made to Twitter.
But did you know that it’s actually quite easy to see somebody’s first tweet?
Despite the fact that Twitter will only let you see up to 3,200 posts on your timeline, there’s actually some easy things you can do to show only your first few tweets on the site.
So without any further ado, let’s look over how to see someone’s first tweets on Twitter!
How To See Someone’s First Tweet On Twitter
Currently, there are a few different methods to find out an account’s first tweet – whether it’s your own, or someone else’s.
Let’s look over each one individually!
1. How To Find Someone’s First Tweet Using Advanced Search
The first and easiest way to find out somebody’s first tweet is to use Twitter’s advanced search feature.
Advanced search is actually far more powerful than most people realize, and allows you to really filter things down so you’re only seeing the types of tweets you’re actually looking for.
And as you might expect, this also allows you to filter for someone’s first tweets as well.
To start, you’ll want to find out when somebody first joined Twitter. This information is publicly available on each person’s Twitter profile.
This will act as the date you want to filter by.
Next, open up Twitter search and type in anything that you’d like.
On the right side of the search bar, click on the icon with 3 dots, then on ‘Advanced Search.’
Once Advanced Search has been pulled up, you’ll have a lot of options.
There are two important options that you want to pay attention to.
First, under the ‘Accounts’ section you should type the Twitter handle for the person who you’re trying to look up. In this case, I’m trying to look up my first tweet, so I typed JamesMOnline into the box.
Then, you’ll want to scroll down to the ‘Dates’ section and fill out the two date options.
Since you know the first month that the account was made, put the 1st of that month in the ‘From’ box, and the last day of that month in the ‘To’ box. This will show all tweets made from the month the account was created.
The overwhelming majority of the time, this will find the first tweet that was sent from that Twitter account. This is because most people start tweeting straight away after creating their account.
In some cases though, the account may have been made, but not have been used for some time. In these instances, you’ll want to continue moving the dates forward until you finally get a result.
In my case, I didn’t start using my account until nearly two years after I created my account – this is of course exceptionally rare!
Still, this method works, and you can see my first tweet here:
What comment system do you prefer on your blog?
— James McAllister (@JamesMOnline) June 28, 2013
2. How To See Someone’s First Tweet Using Search Operators
The second way to see someone’s first tweet is to use search operators.
This is essentially what the advanced search box does – it creates these operators for you, so you don’t have to. This generally makes using the advanced search box an easier option.
Still, if you have a lot of accounts that you want to look up or you need to continue filtering the dates, than looking for someone’s first tweet using search operators may be a bit faster.
Here’s an example. Generally, the format looks like this:
(from:jamesmonline) until:2013-06-30 since:2013-06-01
Here’s a template for you to use:
(from:ACCOUNTNAMEHERE) until:YYYY-MM-DD since:YYYY-MM-DD
Just replace the placeholders with your own data, and put this into Twitter search. It will accomplish the exact same thing as using the advanced search method above.
Note that Twitter uses Year-Month-Day format for its advanced search, not the Month-Day-Year format used in the United States.
Are There Any Tools That Can Pull Up Someone’s First Twitter Post?
Unfortunately, tools that can automatically pull up somebody’s first post on Twitter no longer seem to exist.
While researching this online, we came across several tools that claimed they were able to bring up somebody’s first tweet on Twitter. Upon trying the tools however, they no longer seem to be working.
In fact, many were pulled offline entirely.
So, as of right now it does seem like the only way to view somebody’s first Tweet is to use the advanced search or search operator methods listed above.
Thankfully, advanced search is extremely powerful and can do a lot more than just pull up somebody’s first posts. So, it’s worth getting familiar with!
Conclusion
Thankfully, pulling up somebody’s first tweet is easy.
All you have to do is use the advanced search function that’s built into Twitter itself. This feature is available to anyone, and can be used on any Twitter account that’s not private.
I hope that you’ve found this article helpful. If you have any other questions about Twitter, please ask them using the comment form below.
Wishing you the best,
– James McAllister