Here’s What To Know About Deleting Your Old Tweets

If you have some regrettable or embarrassing posts you'd like to get rid of, then you need to know how to delete old Tweets quickly. Maybe some of your older tweets are unprofessional and you want to clean up your profile for potential future employers, or you don't want anyone to know how much you used to love watching The Apprentice (speaking of someone who might want to delete their tweets). Fortunately, there are a few ways to quickly clean up your Twitter feed.

If you want to get your tweets off Twitter but you just can't bear to part with them entirely, you can get a zip file of your old tweets emailed to you. Go into your account settings on Twitter, then select the "Your Twitter data" tab under "Data and permissions." This will take you to a tab where you can download your Twitter data after re-entering your password.

Once you have your old tweets saved for posterity, it's time to start deleting. If you don't want to use a service, you can delete directly from Twitter. If you know what you're looking for, use the advanced search feature to make your job easier. Enter keywords, phrases, and hashtags to pull up a bunch of tweets that you know you're going to want to trash.

If you have several years of tweet regret you'd like to forget, there's a program called Tweet Deleter that can get the job done fast. You can log in with your Twitter account and easily browse all of your tweets. You can select multiple tweets to delete, delete your full history, schedule automatic tweet deleting based on preferences you set, and more. Search by keyword and tweet type (retweet, replies, comments) for free. With a premium membership, you can search via date and media type as well.

This service gives you several options to get rid of old tweets without investing a ton of time in cleaning up your Twitter feed. There's another service called TweetDelete that works similarly, though it's limited to 3,200 Tweets in one deletion.

If you just don't trust yourself tweeting any more, you can take the very bold step of deactivating your Twitter account. While this might sound super scary, you actually have 30 days to change your mind once you hit the deactivate button. If you want to reactivate your account in that period, enter your login on Twitter and you can reactivate your account, good as new.

But whether you remove old tweets or remove your account altogether, those tweets won't disappear right away. Search engines cache information in their systems. This means that even after you delete tweets, they could continue to show up in search results until the search engines update their systems, according to Twitter. However, despite being visible in searches, clicking on those tweet links will go to an error page. No one will actually be able to get to them (unless someone took screenshots and posted them somewhere else). Happy deleting!