Software Alternatives & Reviews

Where to get Twitter dataset for academic research?

Twitter is one of the fastest sources of news and a popular social media platform. Every major brand, political figure, athlete, celebrity, etc, use Twitter. Twitter users check Twitter 8-10 times each day. Users post over 6000 tweets each second, which takes it to over 500 million tweets each day. That is a whole lot of tweets!

The massive number of tweets shared on this platform is a digital treasure chest for marketers, researchers, and students. Analyzing tweets can help you understand what users are talking about or identify popular topics of discussion. It can help you perform market research, perform sentiment analysis, or study human behavior. It can also provide you with market and business intelligence. Identify popular, rising, and falling trends, analyze their impact, detect fake news, and much more.

In this post, we are going to discuss the various ways you can download Twitter datasets. Let’s dive in,

1. Scrape datasets with Twitter API’s

Let’s discuss the Twitter API’s that you can use to download Twitter datasets for -

Search API:

The search API can help you pull historical tweets (tweets that have already happened). You can pull data related to any keyword or username. Although, there are limitations to how much data you can access. With the Search API, you can only access the latest 3200 tweets with the username as your search criteria. As for keywords as your search criteria, you can pull up to 5000 latest tweets.

Streaming API:

The streaming API can help you pull tweets in real-time. The end-user can specify their search criteria (keyword, username, hashtag, etc). After specifying the requirements, Twitter will start pushing data related to the specified search criteria. However, similar to search API, the streaming API also has limitations. It can only help you access a sample of tweets related to the search criteria. The sample size can vary from 1% to 40% of the total tweets related to the username, keyword, or hashtag.

Firehose API:

The Firehose API is one of the most efficient ways to extract tweets related to any search criteria. You can extract 100% of the tweets related to any username, keyword, or hashtag. The Firehose API is managed by two data-providers, GNIP and DataSift, both have close relations with Twitter.

The Firehose API can pull all tweets related to a search-criteria, but unlike the streaming API, the service isn’t free. You can remove the data gathering limitations but for a fair price.

2. Purchase datasets from Twitter

You can purchase historical Twitter data directly from Twitter through the Historical Powertrack enterprise product. It also offers a few more options compared to the public API for filtering tweets. Although while purchasing tweets you may have to pay a significant amount of money for the data. The price is often decided by the time required to pull data for the search query. Shorter time periods may cost less. One thing that you can be assured about is the quality of the data, get access to all tweets related to your search query.

3. Find existing Twitter data set online

Another easy way to overcome the limitations of Twitter API’s is by finding existing Twitter datasets. Many individuals, researchers, organizations, etc, share Twitter datasets on platforms like Kaggle, Figshare, GitHub, and more. Find a Twitter dataset that meets your requirements and save your valuable time and money. Get access to a wide range of Twitter datasets to perform research. Visit Twitter datasets to check out the mega compilation of Twitter data sets which have integrated from all over the internet.

4. Download Twitter Datasets with third party service providers

Finally, the last way to download Twitter datasets is through third-party Twitter analytics tools. There are various tools available to download Twitter dataset such as Brand24, Keyhole. Pick one of the best AI-based retrieval tool in which you find all the relevant and affordable features. TrackMyHashtag is an AI-driven paid Twitter analytics tool that can help you download custom Twitter datasets related to any search criteria (hashtag, mention, keyword) at a quite reasonable price. Extract tweets related to your search query in real-time.

Key features of TrackMyHashtag:

• Access Twitter datasets of any time-period

• Download tweets related to any search criteria (hashtag, mention, keyword)

• Get dataset in Excel,CSV or JSON file

• Download geo-location-based tweets

• Access language-based tweets

Just go to the official website of Trackmyhashtag and click on ‘Historical Data’ and fill the request form stating your requirements. The team will get back to you with the specifics, pricing and other details for the requested data.

Closing Thoughts

Twitter datasets are a valuable source of information, and above are the most effective and widely used means to access them. Use Twitter API, download it from the internet, or let third-party tools like TrackMyHashtag do it for you. Adios.


About the author

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Caitlyn Davis
Social Media Marketing Expert. Novels and Photography are my fav hobbies