Book Image

Python Social Media Analytics

By : Baihaqi Siregar, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Michal Krystyanczuk
Book Image

Python Social Media Analytics

By: Baihaqi Siregar, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Michal Krystyanczuk

Overview of this book

Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Pinterest, and YouTube have become part of everyday life in a big way. However, these complex and noisy data streams pose a potent challenge to everyone when it comes to harnessing them properly and benefiting from them. This book will introduce you to the concept of social media analytics, and how you can leverage its capabilities to empower your business. Right from acquiring data from various social networking sources such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and social forums, you will see how to clean data and make it ready for analytical operations using various Python APIs. This book explains how to structure the clean data obtained and store in MongoDB using PyMongo. You will also perform web scraping and visualize data using Scrappy and Beautifulsoup. Finally, you will be introduced to different techniques to perform analytics at scale for your social data on the cloud, using Python and Spark. By the end of this book, you will be able to utilize the power of Python to gain valuable insights from social media data and use them to enhance your business processes.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Getting the data


YouTube provides very powerful APIs that can be used for interacting with videos or just getting information about them. The various numbers of APIs, endpoints, and parameters are a good selection of tools for creating applications and for getting informative data for further analysis. To follow the title of the chapter, we will be interested in the data that can bring valuable information about brands or products.

The Google documentation regarding the YouTube API is really large; hence, we will focus only on some parts of it to get started with this API, easily and rapidly. For our objective, we will use the YouTube Data API.

We are going to make authorized HTTP requests to the YouTube API www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3 for retrieving data.

The endpoint has several resources (methods). For our case, the methods /videos and /commentThreads will return sufficient amounts of data.

Like other APIs, the YouTube API requires an authorization. Basically, when the user requests some...