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There's an existing Twitter account with 500,000 followers.

How do I download a complete list of followers for a Twitter account of that size?

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You can use the twitter REST api to get all the followers.

First you need the followers/ids method:

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/followers/ids

With that method you can get all the id's (beware you can only get 5000 id's at the time).

If needed you can get more info for the follower(s) with the users/lookup method:

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/users/lookup

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+1 @Erwin: Awesome. Looked at the docs and the output, but it's not clear how the "cursor" parameter works. Does passing a value of "-1" to the "cursor" parameter return (0-4999), and "0" (5000-9999), and "1" (5000-9999), etc? Also, what are those userIDs being sorted on; meaning ID, follow-date, etc.? Huge thanks! – blunders May 25 '12 at 19:08
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@blunders To begin paging provide a value of -1 as the cursor. The response from the API will include a previous_cursor and next_cursor to allow paging back and forth. – Bibhas May 25 '12 at 19:15
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The followers appear to be based on follow date (this is purely from experience). You can't view the follow date, but this also allows that API to stay consistent. However, as new people follow these accounts you could run into a situation where a user account appears on more than 1 page. – Dez May 25 '12 at 19:16
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+1 @Dez: Yes, I can see how for a account with a lot of followers, and lots of followers being added real-time, that pages might get result in dups, but if the page is done from most recent, this so more of a performance issue than anything, right? – blunders May 25 '12 at 19:21
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@blunders yes. But my experience with the twitter follower api is that it can be slow at times. meaning 2-3 seconds between some request/response and 100-200ms between others – Dez May 25 '12 at 19:22
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