Tracking Your Twitter Contacts with BatchBook (and Remembering Who They Are!)
- Posted August 25th, 2008
- Filed under: How We Do It, Social Media, Using BatchBook
Update: When you import your Twitter contacts into BatchBook, be sure to put the username inside a Feed Reader SuperTag field. That way we’ll show you the last three tweets on their contact detail page (also works with any other kinds of feeds). See more about the Feed Reader SuperTag.
As Michelle wrote last week, we’re Twitter fans at BatchBlue. I love that Twitter is so simple, but I find myself wishing I could better track information about my Twitter contacts. For example, I’m following enough people now that I don’t remember why I started following a lot of them in the first place. I know BatchBook is a great way to track contacts, so I’ve been looking for the best way to get my Twitter contacts into BatchBook.
Mike Gunderloy recently wrote a post about a service called Tweetake over at Web Worker Daily. The service exports your Twitter friends, followers, tweets, or all the above to a CSV for backup. While “backup” may be the intended purpose, I immediately though “import”. As in… Import into BatchBook!
So, the steps are:
Step 1: Export your Twitter friends from Tweetake
Go to tweetake.com, enter your username and password, and export your Friends to CSV.
Step 2: Create a “twitter” SuperTag in BatchBook and export your BatchBook Import Template
BatchBook allows you to import all sorts of custom info. In this case, we’ll import Twitter username along with first name and last name. In your BatchBook account, first create a “twitter” SuperTag with fields for username and whatever else you might want to track. Next, export the BatchBook Import template. This template is located on the Contacts tab and contains all of your SuperTag fields along with contact information fields.
Step 3: Copy the info you want from the Tweetake CSV into the BatchBook Import CSV and Import it!
I copied the Twitter username and contact name into the template, opting to add other information later. If your Twitter friends are already in your BatchBook account, you can simply merge the data with the already-existing contact record. Once you import the file, your Twitter friends will be tagged with the “twitter” SuperTag. You can then track anything you want about them!
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Are you the great saviour of all twitterers? Can I merge two sets of followers into one via your app?
Hi Gordon:
Yes!
NOTE: With the recent release of our API, importing your contacts will be easier in the future.
But if you use the process outlined above, simply use the name column in both CSV files to hunt for duplicates. When you choose an import, select “Merge Duplicates”. That’ll take out the dupes!
Hi Adam
This looks very cool.
Couple of questions. When I exported friends from Twetake, the CSV only listed 100.
Also, the CSV they exported has a field for name, but not first and last. When I import using the BB import template, how will that work?
thanks
Hello Erick:
Hmm… been a while since I used TweetTake, but it appears they may be limited to 100 because of API limitations.
Regarding the first and last being in the same field, BatchBook will parse those out into first and last on import. In the case that someone has a two-word first name or last name (or uses something other than their real name), you may need to do some manual tweaking. But for the most part, you should be good to go!
Thanks!