I exported a competitor’s following list on Twitter: what I found
A competitor’s Following tab on X tells you whose voices it listens to, and X will not let you read the whole thing. I wanted that list for a positioning project, and the rival’s Following tab gave me a few screens before it slowed and stopped. No sort, no filter, no download. What I had after all that scrolling was a fragment, and a fragment of a network says almost nothing about the network.
The only reliable way I found to read a rival’s full network is to export it. Circleboom exports the complete following list of any public X account into a CSV through official X Enterprise APIs, with bio, account age and quality flags on every row.
→ Export a competitor’s following list on Twitter
Below: the export, then the four columns that turned the file into answers.
X stopped loading the rival’s following list before I learned anything
The first attempt failed for a reason that has nothing to do with patience. X lets you open another account’s following list, but it shows a partial, unordered scroll that stops loading after a point and cannot be filtered or exported.
The follower side has the same wall. The post on why you can’t see all of someone’s followers on Twitter explains it.
I tried the obvious workarounds anyway. I screenshotted. I pasted handles into a sheet. I scrolled again from the top, hoping the tab would load further on a second pass.
Each pass gave me a different slice, and none of them told me where the list ended.
What bothered me most was simple. I could not tell whether the accounts I was missing were the boring ones or the important ones, and a gap you cannot see is a gap you cannot correct for.
A competitor’s following list is only useful when you know it is complete.
That is the moment I stopped scrolling and decided to pull a rival’s full following list on Twitter as a file I could sort.
Why I wanted who my rival follows on Twitter
Most competitor research starts with followers, because followers look like customers.
I wanted the other direction. A competitor’s following list is a record of its attention: the people and publications it trusts enough to keep in its feed.
That attention tells you things a follower list cannot:
- Which voices the competitor treats as sources.
- Which partners or suppliers it keeps an eye on.
- Which communities it wants to be seen inside.
Followers describe the audience a brand has won. Following describes the network a brand has chosen.
For a positioning project, the chosen network was the more honest signal.
There is a practical reason too. A rival with a large audience can have tens of thousands of followers, most of whom never think about the brand again. Its following list is usually far shorter and far more deliberate. Someone at that company decided each of those follows, at some point, for some reason.
That makes the list small enough to read and specific enough to argue with.
How Circleboom gets the whole following list from X
Circleboom’s Export Followers or Following feature downloads the complete following list of any public X account as a structured CSV, one row per followed account. It requests the list through official X API access using your connected account, so the file does not stop where the tab stops.
That source matters for a research file. Circleboom is an official X Enterprise Developer listed in X’s customer directory, so the records come from X itself rather than from a script copying whatever the page rendered.
Scraping-based collection can miss rows when loading breaks, and in research a silent gap is worse than an obvious one.
Each row carries the account’s public profile data next to Circleboom’s own quality flags, and the section on the four columns below covers the ones I read first.
Circleboom lets you export a competitor’s following list on Twitter for any public account, not only your own.
The export uses tokens, and the page shows your remaining balance before you confirm, so you see the cost of a large list before anything is spent. When you are ready, you can download any competitor’s Twitter following list as a CSV from the same page.
What the export looks like from start to finish: a public account’s username going in, and the accounts it follows coming out as a CSV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHwKj1qtwr8
How I export a competitor’s following list on Twitter
The routine I use now takes five steps in two short phases.
Get to the export page inside Circleboom
Log in to Circleboom Twitter with the X account you do your research from; Circleboom requests the list through that connection.
Go to Essential Toolbox, open Export Tools and choose Export Followers or Following.
Pull the rival’s list into a file
- Type the competitor’s username into the search field and check the profile card that appears, especially its following count.
- Select Export Following and read the remaining token balance shown under the profile card.
- Click Export and open the CSV in Google Sheets or Excel.
The profile card step is the one I never skip. Two brands with similar handles can look alike in a search box, and the card’s following count tells you how many rows to expect before you spend a token.
There is a second route to the same file. When you open another account’s following list in Circleboom’s search view, the whole list sits in one filterable table, and the Export button there asks you to confirm the number of profiles and shows how your token balance will change.
I use that route when I want to sort or filter the list before downloading it, and the Export Followers or Following page when I already know I want everything.
What can a competitor’s following list on X tell you?
A competitor’s following list tells you who the competitor pays attention to, which is the closest public record of its research network. When the niche’s most credible accounts all follow the same handful of voices, those voices are where the niche’s thinking starts.
Read that way, the file stops being a contact list and becomes market research.
The idea is the same one behind using Twitter as a market research tool: public behavior on X is data, and a follow is a small, deliberate vote. An exported competitor’s following list collects those votes in one place.
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What the file will not tell you is why each follow happened.
Some follows are sources. Some are courtesy follow-backs from years ago. Some are accounts that went quiet long ago and were never cleaned out.
Telling those apart is the real work, and the columns do most of it.
The four columns I read first in a competitor’s X following export
My first export of a competitor’s following list on Twitter was a few hundred rows that all looked equally important. Sorting by follower count did not help, because big accounts are not the same as relevant accounts.
What helped was reading four columns, in this order.
Four columns separate a rival’s real sources from its leftover follows: IsVerified, Bio, CreatedAt, then IsFake and IsInactive.
IsVerified shows the accounts with a known identity
I start with IsVerified and Verified_Type, which marks blue, business and government verification. Verified business accounts in a rival’s following list can point to partners, vendors or media outlets. They are the fastest way to map who the competitor does business with in public.
Bio keywords show the role behind each follow
Next I filter the Bio column for role words such as these:
- Founder.
- Analyst.
- Editor.
- Podcast.
- The name of the niche itself.
A keyword filter turns a wall of handles into groups: the founders the rival watches, the journalists it follows, the creators it learns from. This is where positioning ideas come from, because you see which conversations the competitor wants to be close to.
CreatedAt separates old habits from recent choices
CreatedAt is the account creation date. It does not tell you when the rival followed someone, but it does tell you something useful.
A follow of an account created recently is, by definition, a recent choice. Old accounts can be old follows or new ones; young accounts in the list are proof of where the competitor’s attention went lately.
IsFake and IsInactive clear out the noise
Last, I filter out rows flagged IsFake or IsInactive, and look twice at IsEgghead and IsOveractive. These are Circleboom’s own quality classifications, not verdicts from X, so I treat them as a sorting aid rather than a judgment.
Removing them is what turns the remaining rows into a list of real, active sources.
What is left after those four passes is short. It is also the part of the file I trust.
Follow counts split sources from peers
One more sort earns its place after the four passes. Comparing CountFollowers with CountFriends on each remaining row splits the list in two.
Accounts with large audiences that follow few people tend to be publications and well-known brands. Accounts with balanced counts tend to be peers who follow back.
The first group shows where the rival gets its information. The second shows who it talks with.
The short list becomes a list on X and a follow queue
I keep the short list in an X List. After I review and deduplicate the rows in a spreadsheet, Circleboom’s Manage Your X Lists adds them to a list in bulk, so the rival’s sources land in one feed I can read in a few minutes.
Some of those accounts will be worth following yourself. The walkthrough on how to follow all the people one account is following on X covers that route.
Circleboom’s Twitter bulk follow runs only after you confirm the batch. It paces follows at 50 every 15 minutes and up to 400 a day, then continues the rest of the queue the next day.
How do I keep up when my competitor follows someone new on X?
You keep up by tracking the account, because an export is a snapshot.
The file shows the following list at the moment of retrieval. Any follow the competitor adds afterwards will not appear in it, and old exports can mislead a decision that depends on the current state.
That is why I pair the export with a watch. The export answers “who does this rival listen to today”. Tracking answers “who did it start listening to this week”.
The second question is often the more interesting one, because a new follow can point to a partnership or a new topic before anything is announced.
Circleboom’s Monitoring menu lets you track someone’s X followers and followings over time, so new follows show up without a fresh export every week. The post on how to track recent following on X shows it on a real account.
My own rhythm is one full export at the start of a project, then tracking from there, then a fresh export when the project needs a clean baseline again.
You do not need a research team to read a rival’s network on X
The work I expected to take a week of scrolling took one export and an hour with four columns.
There is no scraping setup and no data analyst involved. A public username and a profile card check are the whole barrier, and the token cost is on screen before you commit.
If a competitor’s network has been a blind spot in your positioning work, start with the one rival you watch most closely and read its file through the four columns. The data comes through Circleboom’s official access to X, so the list you read is the full list X returns for that account.
→ Get a competitor’s following list from Twitter into a spreadsheet
Still wondering what a rival’s follow list can show?
Can I export who a private competitor account follows on X?
No. Circleboom exports only public accounts, and a protected account’s following list is not accessible through X’s API even if you follow that account. The list stays visible only to the people the account has approved.
Should I export the competitor’s followers instead of its following?
Export following when your question is who the competitor pays attention to, and followers when your question is who its audience is. Both come from the same Circleboom screen, so you can run one export of each and compare.
Why does my file have fewer rows than the following count on the profile?
For very large accounts, Circleboom retrieves the list from X in batches, and the row count can come out lower than the displayed count because of API pagination limits. Large lists can also take longer to process than small ones.
How much does exporting a competitor’s following list cost?
The export uses tokens in proportion to the number of accounts in the list, and Circleboom shows your remaining balance before you confirm. If the balance is too low for the list size, the export waits until you add tokens; current pricing is on the Circleboom website.
