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


In this section, we will work on two types of data:

  • Your own pins extracted through Pinterest API
  • Scraped search results

Pinterest API

Pinterest uses a RESTful API that lets you access the platform data. The data comes in the form of boards, pins, followers, and more. In order to interact with the API it is necessary to use OAUTH which allows both read and write permissions.

Communication with the API requires an access token. The access token can be obtained by creating an application on a user's Pinterest account. After creating an application, we need to go through a few steps to get all the access privileges.

Step 1 - creating an application and obtaining app ID and app secret

The first task is to create an application to communicate with the API:

  1. Log in to your Pinterest account.
  2. Go to apps at https://developers.pinterest.com/apps/.
  3. Agree to the terms and policy and click on Create app.
  4. Choose a name and create the app.

Pinterest has clear rules and policies in terms of using its...