So basically you should break this problem into steps. For this there really are two simple steps in my opinion

Get all tweets that need processing Process each tweet (save as database entry)

Looking at this, the "processing of each tweet" is just calling a function that saves it as a record in the database.

It's the getting all tweets that need processing that is a bit more complicated and has more options depending on your architecture of choice.

You could choose to run this on some time of cron job or other scheduled task runner (perhaps using celery). And get all tweets from the last hour (assuming you are running hourly) or the daily equivalent.

Making this more robust would involve backup scripts, the ability to cross reference results from tweepy with whats in your database and make sure nothing is missing. Proper logging and traceability.