One of the questions I hear constantly from streamers at every level is some version of the same thing. When did I follow this person? When did they follow me? Is this person still following me back?
The answer to all of those questions comes down to the Twitch follow date and for a long time Twitch's own interface made it genuinely difficult to find that information in any useful format. That is why I built tools around it at Streamotive. This article walks through what your Twitch follow date actually tells you and how to pull that data without spreadsheets or guesswork.
What is a Twitch follow date and why does it matter
Every time someone follows a channel on Twitch a timestamp is recorded. That timestamp is your Twitch follow date and it applies in both directions. There is the date you followed a channel and the date a viewer followed yours.
On its own that sounds like a minor detail. In practice it is genuinely useful data for a few different reasons.
Knowing when you followed a channel helps you audit your following list. If you followed a streamer two years ago and have not watched them since the follow date makes it easy to identify who to clean up so your live notifications stay relevant.
Knowing when someone followed your channel helps you identify your earliest supporters, track growth across specific time periods and understand which moments or clips might have triggered a wave of follows. When you can see that ten people followed you on the same day that usually means something worked.
How to check when you followed someone on Twitch
Streamotive's Follow Back List is the tool built specifically for this. You log in with your Twitch account and the tool syncs your follows and displays them in a filterable list that shows the channel name, the exact date you followed and whether that channel follows you back.
You can filter by name if you are looking for a specific streamer or sort by date if you want to find your oldest follows or see who you started following recently. The mutual follow column runs in real time which means if someone unfollows you the status updates without you having to manually refresh anything.
This is the tool to use when you want to answer questions like:
How long have I been following this person? Who in my following list is not following me back? Which channels have I been following for years and probably never watch anymore?
How to check when someone followed your channel
This works through Streamotive's companion tool the Follower List. Where the Follow Back List is about who you follow the Follower List is about who follows you and when they started.
You get a searchable list of every account that follows your channel with the Twitch follow date they followed you. Sorting by date lets you find your very first followers which if you have been streaming for a while can be a meaningful thing to revisit. Those are the people who found you before you had any proof the channel was worth following.
You can also use the follow date data here to spot patterns. A cluster of new followers around a particular date usually points to something specific. A clip that circulated, a raid that landed well or a collaboration that brought new eyes to your channel. The date alone does not tell you the full story but it points you to where to look.
Using the Twitch follow date to clean up your following list
One of the most practical uses of follow date data is managing notification noise. Twitch sends live notifications for every channel you follow and if you have been on the platform for any length of time that list can grow into something you have completely lost track of.
Filtering your follows by date inside Streamotive's Follow Back List makes the cleanup process straightforward. You can sort from oldest to newest and work through the channels you have been following the longest to decide which ones you still actually want to hear from. Unfollowing is done directly on Twitch once you have identified who to remove but the tool makes the identification step much faster than scrolling through Twitch's own interface.
Why Streamotive offers these tools for free
I built Streamotive because I was a streamer who kept running into problems that should have had simple solutions and did not. The Twitch follow date question was one of them. The data exists and Twitch exposes it through their API but there was no clean way for an individual streamer to access it without technical knowledge.
Making that data visible in a straightforward tool that anyone can use with a single login felt like an obvious thing to build. Both the Follow Back List and the Follower List are free and they work for channels of any size whether you have thirty followers or thirty thousand.
The summary
Your Twitch follow date tells you more than it seems to at first. It helps you understand who your earliest supporters were, audit your following list for channels you have moved on from and spot patterns in your own channel growth.
Streamotive's Follow Back List handles the data for who you follow and when you followed them including whether they follow you back. The Follower List handles the data for who follows your channel and when they started. Both are free and both sync directly from your Twitch account with no manual input required.
If you have ever found yourself trying to work out when a follow happened or whether a specific person still follows your channel these are the tools that answer that question in about thirty seconds.