Hi Danladi,

We have done it manually. We examined more than 2700 tweets posted on Twitter through using content analysis. You can find it here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283356194_Electronic_word_of_mouth_in_social_media_The_common_characteristics_of_retweeted_and_favourited_marketer-generated_content_posted_on_Twitter

However, I ve seen a paper which suggests a quicker way of collection and analysis of tweets. You can access via the link: https://www.academia.edu/22565133/CATS_Collection_and_Analysis_of_Tweets_Made_Simple

Hope these helps.

Best wishes, Ismail.

Article Electronic word of mouth in social media: The common charact...

Yes, both have extensive (and impressive) API's

In the case of Facebook if you can get someone to install your "App" you potentially have access to all sorts of information about them but you are limited by whatever permissions each person has set about who can see what information.

Facebook have really made an effort to help developers build useful (and commercial) apps on top of the Facebook platform. Try having a poke around with the Facebook Graph API explorer. All very impressive (if slightly scary) stuff.

Twitter is very similar in principle although the API, data structures and tools are much simpler. Documentation | Twitter Developers

Given that you've asked this question, I suspect you'll be surprised at the extent to which this data is freely shared.

Harvesting data manually is too much of hard work and can be avoided. First let me start with Twitter:

1. Twitter: Twitter has a lot of wonderful APIs so that you can fetch data of any kind (just by following their API documentation which is worth reading for every developer). There are different kinds of APIs and their usage limits depends on the API that you use. For some kind of data, you need authentication while for some are freely available. I have put some links below which can get you started on collecting data from Twitter. Do always keep in mind the rate limits and always be on the safe side of that if you don't want your application to get blocked for undefined period of time. (It is too frustrating!). 

The first step is to register you application and get the 4 different keys to put iit in your application for authentication of your app. I have written python codes(which use python libraries like tweepy, twitter api) written in python. These are just my go-to libraries if I need data from twitter.

Types of APIs:

#. REST API - If you want old data, that has been lying in their data stores for quite some time, then you need to go through the link given below.

#. Streaming API  - If you want real-time data being generated on twitter, then you have to use this API. 

2. Facebook: The last time I used facebook api to collect data, I found it too restricted. The process is similar like twitter though. If you want data from your friend's profile then you need your friend to authenticate your app to access your data. That means you can harvest data of people who agree to allow your application to get data. In short, you might never get the full facebook social network graph if you need it. There are other web sites that make that data available. The link is given below.

https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public

https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview

https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview/request-parameters

http://snap.stanford.edu/data/index.html

Thank you

Most grateful 

Hi Danladi,

Check out this special search engine,

https://www.twellow.com/splash/

Bye,

Thanks 

Hi Danladi, 

You can get Twitter and Facebook data from Podargos Data. It can provide historical and realtime data. It's able to help you retrieve other mobile App data of social networks and e-commerce. All you have to do is to tell them your needs. 

Podargos' website is http://www.podargos.com

Here is the data sample: http://goo.gl/dRxyow

You can use DiscoverText (https://discovertext.com) for real time Twitter and some Facebook data. You can use Sifter (https://sifter.texifter.com) for historical Twitter data.

Realtime data collection using the Twitter Search API and the Gnip PowerTrack 2.0 is available using a point and click (no programming) interface at https://discovertext.com. Here are the top 10 reasons to use DiscoverText:

https://vimeo.com/170157685

For three free historical Twitter data estimates per day, create a free account on Sifter (https://sifter.texifter.com).

I have found DiscoverText to be a really accessible platform that is easy to use — hope this helps!

A good solution is to use sentiment analysis on downloaded from specific websites, including social media portals collected in Big Data database systems.

I also have the same aim. Upto now, it seems not such a straightforward job; I would agree with a previous answer in terms of using 'discovertext' to reap certain category of twitter feeds, but then if you want to further do processing with those data, it's not that direct.

The facebook APIs I have seen gives access by account profile or object ids, but I haven't seen anything by category yet.