Twitter analytics gurus help me count the ways

October 15, 2015 8:42 PM

Is there a way to count how many times a specific twitter account has tweeted out a hashtag?

I'm asking for a friend who works for a company. They've asked him to count how many times their company has tweeted or retweeted a particular hashtag. Maybe the hashtag is #omgponies!

All the free tools online just count all tweets across the board for a hashtag. I think the company wants to know how much activity their tweeting out #omgponies! is stirring up in the twittersphere and who it's coming from. Is it just from my little pony fanatics or famous equestrians, too? He said counting this himself would take a long time and it wouldn't tell him 'engagement'.

posted by lillian.elmtree to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

You can do this with the Twitter API, but back when I used it you could only retrieve something on the order of an user's ~3k most recent tweets or something like that. Not sure if that'll be a problem, but it basically boils down to: query the API for an user, get their tweets, search tweets by hashtag and count up the number of occurrences/tweets, and you're done.
posted by un petit cadeau at 8:55 PM on October 15, 2015

Is it enough to use Twitter advanced search? Here's all the mentions of #lispjobs on my Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22%23lispjobs%22%20from%3Awillf&src=typd&lang=en
posted by willF at 9:06 PM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'd download the entire Twitter archive, open in excel and do a search for the hashtag.
posted by teststrip at 11:18 PM on October 15, 2015

(This is assuming he has access to the account, of course.)
posted by teststrip at 11:22 PM on October 15, 2015

One of the methods this is done with is using apache Storm for real time stream analytics on Twitter. If you listen to this episode of SE radio you can get more details.
posted by Rubbstone at 11:22 PM on October 15, 2015

Best answer: I would download the data and then search for it. You can download all the account data in the account settings.

edit: I think WillF's way looks pretty easy as long as you look for all tweets ("live") and not top tweets.
posted by AppleTurnover at 11:41 PM on October 15, 2015

Is this a one time thing or ongoing?
posted by k8t at 11:43 PM on October 15, 2015

I use Rowfeeder to track hashtags and it also breaks down the data by who tweeted it.
posted by ukdanae at 4:13 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wait. How do you download the entire Twitter archive?

Just an account's archive, not the entirety of Twitter: Downloading your Twitter archive
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:03 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Reporting back from my friend: Using the search feature is a great idea, though it didn't bring up every tweet with the hashtag, even live. Row feeder charges a fee and has a lot of hoop jumping to get a free trial. So I ended up downloading all tweets from the time period and spent an hour counting hashtags. Still manual but totally doable. This same report gave me the other numbers. Wasn't as hard or tedious as I thought it would be. Major thanks to all the gurus!

So my friend is happy and I get a free lunch. Thanks Mefites!

I'll keep this question alive a bit longer in case anyone else has an idea for figuring how well a hashtag is creating buzz and engaging people.
posted by lillian.elmtree at 9:39 AM on October 16, 2015

Best answer: Well if that's what you're looking for, you may want to check out the Twitter analytics dashboard. The home tab will show your top tweets, but the tweets tab will show you how every tweet of yours performed in terms of how many people saw it (impressions) and how many people clicked on it/the link/the hashtag (engagement). It won't track by hashtag, but you can do a ctrl+F for the hashtag and then see how the tweets with the hashtag performed.
posted by AppleTurnover at 12:00 PM on October 16, 2015