Export Any X Account's Followers in One Click

An export is not a screenshot of a follower list. It is a structured table with one row per account and fourteen columns, and it is worth knowing what is in those columns before you run one. For every follower — or for every account someone follows, if you export the following list instead — XTract records the @username and the display name, the bio exactly as written, the follower count, the following count and the lifetime post count, verified status (both the legacy blue check and an X Premium subscription), the profile picture and banner image URLs, the free-text location field, the account creation date, the website link from the profile, and the numeric X user ID.

The last two are the ones people underestimate. The creation date is how you tell a real audience from a block of accounts registered last month, and the numeric user ID is the only stable key you get: handles change all the time, IDs never do, so two exports taken six months apart can still be joined on it. Everything else is there so you can narrow a crowd down to a list — the bio and location columns are what make a 40,000-row file usable.

Every export writes two files at once, a .csv and a .json, both named after the account and the list you pulled. The CSV has a header row and one line per account, so it opens straight into Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets and sorts and filters like any other spreadsheet: sort by follower count to surface the biggest accounts, filter the bio column for a keyword, filter the location column for a city. The JSON holds the same records as an array of objects, which is what you want when the next step is a pandas dataframe, an R script or a CRM import rather than a spreadsheet. Nothing is trimmed between the two formats — all fourteen fields appear in both.

Competitive research. Export a competitor's followers, export your own, and compare the two files in a spreadsheet. The interesting number is not the overlap but the gap: the accounts following them and not you, sorted by follower count, is a short and very concrete list of people to reach.

Lead and candidate sourcing. Export the followers of a well-known account in your niche, then filter the bio column for a job title and the location column for a market. A raw crowd of 30,000 becomes a shortlist of a few hundred people who have already self-identified as interested in the subject, with their websites and audience sizes attached.

Influencer and partner discovery. Export the following list of a large account rather than its followers. What a major account chooses to follow is a curated set, and sorting it by follower count is a fast way to find the mid-sized accounts in a niche without trawling a hashtag.

Audience backup. Plenty of people simply export their own followers every few months and keep the files. Platforms change their rules, accounts get locked, and an audience you cannot take with you is not really yours. A CSV in a folder costs nothing and is the only version of that list you control.

For a longer walkthrough with screenshots of each step, read how to export X/Twitter followers to CSV. If you work on Threads as well as X, the same idea is covered by our Threads follower export extension.