Competitor research built on half a list gives you confident answers to the wrong question. X shows you another account's following list, but only as a partial scroll that stops loading, so any conclusion drawn from it rests on whichever accounts happened to load.
Exporting the full list fixes that, as long as you export the right list.
How do you export the accounts a competitor follows on X?
Enter the competitor's username in Circleboom's Export Followers or Following page, confirm its profile card, choose Export Following and download the CSV. Circleboom retrieves the complete following list of any public X account through X's official Enterprise APIs.
→ Save any competitor's following list from Twitter as a CSV
Why X won't hand over a competitor's following list
X lets anyone open the following list of a public account, but the native view is built for browsing, not research. The list loads a portion and stops. It cannot be sorted or filtered, and there is no export button anywhere on it.
For a rival following a few hundred accounts you might reach the end; for one following thousands, you never know how much you missed.
The usual workarounds share the same flaw:
- Scrolling and copying handles by hand covers only what the page loads.
- Screenshots capture names without bios, counts or account age.
- Copy-paste into a sheet breaks the moment the page reorders.
A partial following list is biased toward whatever X chose to load first.
Picture how that misleads a positioning brief: a team could conclude that a rival "mostly follows investors" only because those accounts sat near the top of the scroll.
For an agency, the stakes are higher still. A client report that names a competitor's partners or sources is read as fact, and a partial list turns an honest guess into a claim nobody can check.
The fix is to grab the complete competitor following list from Twitter before anyone draws a conclusion from it.
What Circleboom's following export gives you on X
Circleboom's Export Followers or Following feature downloads the complete following list of any public X account as a structured CSV, with one row per followed account. You enter the username, Circleboom requests the list through official X API access using your connected account, and the file arrives with the same columns for every row.
That data source is the reason the file is worth trusting. Circleboom is a verified Enterprise partner of X, so the rows come from X's own records instead of a copy of whatever a browser rendered.
Scraping-based collection can miss records when page loading breaks or the interface changes, and a research file with silent gaps is harder to catch than one with obvious errors.
What every row of the export holds
Each row in a competitor's following list export carries:
- ProfileId, Username, Name, Location and Bio.
- CountTweets, CountFriends (following) and CountFollowers.
- IsProtected, IsVerified and Verified_Type.
- IsEgghead, IsFake, IsInactive and IsOveractive.
- CreatedAt, the account creation timestamp.
The quality flags are Circleboom's own classifications, not verdicts from X, and they work best as filters.
Exports use tokens in proportion to the list size, and the remaining balance appears on the page before you confirm, so cost is never a surprise.
You do not need any access to the competitor's account. Any public username works, the same way your own does, and the competitor is not involved in the export at all.
With Circleboom you can start a Twitter competitor following list export for your own account or any public account in the niche.
Following or followers: which competitor list answers your question?
The following list answers questions about the competitor's attention; the followers list answers questions about the competitor's audience. Both come from the same Circleboom screen, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason an export feels useless afterwards.
| Your research question | Export this list | Why it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Whose content does the rival read? | Following | Every row is an account it chose |
| Which partners or vendors does it watch? | Following | Business follows sit in this list |
| Who buys from or cheers for the rival? | Followers | Every row chose the rival |
| Which bios and locations should my content target? | Followers | It describes the audience itself |
| Which voices does the whole niche trust? | Following, from several rivals | Shared follows mark the core sources |
Read the table by the verb in your question. "Reads", "watches" and "trusts" point to the following list. "Buys", "cheers" and "targets" point to followers.
When the competitor's following list is the right export
Choose following when you are mapping the rival's network rather than its market. A brand's following list is curated by the brand, so it shows which sources and partners the company considers worth its attention. That makes it the better file for partnership scouting and positioning work, where the question is who shapes the competitor's thinking.
A competitor's following list is also smaller and denser than its follower list for most brands. A rival with a large audience may follow only a few hundred accounts, which means the whole file can be read row by row in one sitting.
When the competitor's followers list is the right export
Choose followers when the question is about customers and reach. The bios and locations in a rival's follower export show who engages with brands like yours, which guides content, outreach and ad targeting.
If a large share of a rival's followers describe themselves as founders, for example, content written for founders is likely to reach that same audience on X.
A follower export filtered to remove IsFake and IsInactive rows also makes a cleaner seed for an X Ads custom audience than the raw list.
The longer explainer on how to export Twitter following and followers lists covers both directions with your own account as well.
There is a second place to look at the following side. Circleboom's X Competitor Analysis & Benchmark Report has a Following view for the accounts you already compare there. The competitor report following export carries its audience-quality panels for each rival's following list.
The Export Followers or Following page is the faster route when you need one rival's list as a row-by-row CSV.
One rival's following list is a snapshot of its sources. Followers lists from the same rival describe a market.
Export Following on screen: the clip walks one page from a typed username to a downloaded following CSV.
How to export a competitor's following list on X, step by step
The flow below has six steps in three phases. The first two get you to the right page, the next three produce the file, and the last one checks it before you act.
Open the export screen in Circleboom
- Open Circleboom Twitter and sign in with the X account you use for research, since Circleboom requests the list through that account's connection.
- Navigate to Essential Toolbox, then Export Tools, then Export Followers or Following.
Point the export at the competitor
- Enter the competitor's X username in the search field and confirm the profile card that loads against the account you meant. The card shows two things worth checking:
- The display name and bio, which separate the real brand from a look-alike handle.
- The following count, which tells you how many rows the CSV should hold.
- Select Export Following and review the remaining token balance shown under the profile card.
- Click Export to spend the tokens and generate the CSV download.
Check the file before acting on it
- Open the CSV in Google Sheets or Excel and compare its row count with the following count on the profile card.
Confirming the profile card first stops a token-costly export of the wrong account, and checking the row count last tells you whether the file is the full list or a large account's paginated slice. Both checks take seconds and protect every decision you make with the file.
A competitor following list export that comes back short is not always an error.
For very large accounts, Circleboom retrieves the list from X in batches, and the exported row count can land below the displayed count because of API pagination limits. Big lists also take longer to process.
If your token balance is lower than the list needs, the export waits until you add tokens, which is another reason to read the balance in step 4.
In short, the sequence is:
- Open Circleboom Twitter and reach Export Followers or Following.
- Enter the competitor's username and confirm the profile card.
- Choose Export Following, check tokens and export.
- Open the CSV and match the row count.
How do you follow the accounts your competitor follows on Twitter?
You follow them in a paced bulk queue, after filtering the export down to the accounts that fit your own goals. Following every row in a rival's list copies its noise along with its sources, so cut the file first:
- Drop rows flagged IsFake or IsInactive.
- Keep bios that match your niche or audience.
- Remove accounts you already follow.
Then hand the short list to Circleboom's bulk follow. It runs only after you confirm the batch and paces activity at 50 follows every 15 minutes and up to 400 a day. Anything left in the queue continues the next day on its own, so a long list never turns into a sudden burst on your account.
The same paced approach works on a competitor's audience too. The guide to automatically follow other accounts' followers on Twitter shows that route, which suits community building more than source research.
Reading a competitor's following export on X before you act
A competitor's following list export from Twitter is a point-in-time record.
It shows the relationships at the moment of retrieval, and profile data such as bios and follower counts reflects that moment too. Anything the competitor follows or unfollows afterwards will not appear in the file.
That has three practical consequences:
- Date every file the moment it downloads.
- Refresh the export when a decision depends on the current list.
- Treat files older than your current project as history, not evidence.
The file also deserves care. A following list is relationship data, and a folder of rival exports is sensitive in the wrong hands, so keep it where only your team can open it.
When one rival is not enough, export several and compare them. Accounts that appear in every rival's following list are the niche's shared sources. The post on how to find the intersection of followers between two Twitter accounts shows the overlap method.
For a quicker look, Circleboom's X account comparison lines accounts up side by side without a spreadsheet.
The cost of researching a rival on X from half a list
Without the full list, competitor research rests on whatever X loaded first, and every brief built on it inherits that bias.
With the export, you work from the complete set of accounts the rival chose to follow, with bios, account age and quality flags on every row, sorted any way your question needs.
Without a date on the file, last quarter's network passes for today's. With a fresh export, a new partner or a new source shows up as a row you can see and sort.
I would not sign off on a positioning or partnership plan without that file anymore.
The export takes a few minutes, the token cost is visible before you commit, and the data comes from X's own records through Circleboom.
→ Run your first competitor following list export on Twitter
Frequently asked about exporting a competitor's following
Will following a protected competitor let me export its following list?
No. A protected account's following list is not available through X's API regardless of follow status, so Circleboom can export only public accounts. X's help page on public and protected posts on X explains what protection changes. The owner's side is covered in how to prevent people from seeing your following list on X.
Is a Chrome extension or scraper good enough to export a following list?
It can work for a short list, but a scraper reads what the page loads, so it can miss records when loading stops or the layout changes. Circleboom retrieves the following list through official X API access instead, which keeps the file tied to X's own records.
