How to Capture Twitter Conversations

Taking a screen shot is one of the standard ways of capturing what you see on your screen, whether you're using a computer or a mobile device. Simply open the tweets you want to capture and press the key or shortcut to take a screen shot. If the conversation is very long, it's unlikely you'll manage to fit all the tweets on the screen at the same time; in this case, you'll need to either stitch the images together using an image-editing program or just save the conversation as several separate images.

The Storify service (link in Resources) makes it possible for you to piece together not just tweets, but also posts from other social media such as Facebook, Google+ and Instagram into a single story. You can give each story a headline and a description, as well as add comments between each tweet or post you include. Once the story is complete, it'll remain saved in your Storify account even if the original tweets are deleted; you can also embed it on other websites, including Tumblr and WordPress.

The Exquisite Tweets service is similar to Storify in that it makes it possible for you to gather several different tweets on a single page, even if they're not part of the same Twitter conversation. You can't, however, pull in posts from other social media or add your own comments. A list of the people involved in the conversation appears at the top of the page, and each tweet has the same background as the user profile of its original poster.

The method you use is largely dependent on what you want to do with the captured conversation. If you want to post it on Facebook, for example, the easiest way to do that would be as an image; Storify offers embedding and the ability to add comments, but putting together a conversation is more complicated than it is in Exquisite Tweets, which offers just bare-bones collating of the tweets on a single page.