Analyzing twitter data

Analyzing Social Media Data in R

Sowmya Vivek

Data Science Coach

Course Overview

• Extract and visualize twitter data
• Analyze tweet text
• Perform network analysis
• View tweets on the map
• Explore tweets on celebrities, brands, hot topics, and sports

Introduction to social media analysis

• Collect data from social media websites
• Analyze data to derive insights
• Make improved business decisions

About Twitter

• Social media platform
• Short messages called tweets
• Micro-blogging site
• Information from tweets & tweet metadata

Power of twitter data

Power of twitter data

Power of twitter data

Power of twitter data

Power of twitter data

Volume of tweets

• Many functions available in R to extract tweets for analysis
• stream_tweets() samples 1% of all publicly available tweets
• Tweets extracted for a 30 second time interval by default

Volume of tweets

live_tweets <- stream_tweets("")
dim(live_tweets)

[1] 1047   90

Volume of tweets

live_tweets60 <- stream_tweets("", timeout = 60)
dim(live_tweets60)

[1] 3464   90

Applications of twitter data

Applications of twitter data

Applications of twitter data

Applications of twitter data

Applications of twitter data

Advantages of twitter data

• Twitter API is open and accessible
• Easier to find conversations because of the hashtag norms
• Since the length of tweets is limited, running algorithms is easy and controlled

Limitations of twitter data

• Historical search is limited for a free account
• A limited number of tweets extracted for a free account
• 1% sample tweets extracted may not be accurate
• Very small % of tweets have geographic tagging

Let's practice!

Analyzing Social Media Data in R