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


The first step to get the data is to set up the Twitter access from its developer platform with two main methods:

  • Getting Twitter API keys
  • Connecting to the Twitter API:
    • Streaming API
    • REST API (Search endpoint)

Getting Twitter API keys

Firstly, you will need to have a Twitter account and obtain credentials (consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access secret) on the Twitter developer platform to access the Twitter API, following these steps:

  1. Create a Twitter user account.
  2. Log in with your Twitter user account at https://apps.Twitter.com/.
  3. Click Create New App.
  4. Fill out the form, agree to the terms, and click on Create your Twitter application.
  5. Go to the next page, click on the Keys and Access Tokens tab, and copy your API key and API secret. Scroll down and click on Create my access token, and copy your Access token, and Access token secret.

Once, we're ready with the Twitter credentials we can move to the next stages of the analysis:

Data extraction

Having all required authorization...