Scrape anyone’s Twitter followers
Following our popular tool which makes it easy to scrape and download tweets, we’re pleased to announce a new one to get any Twitter account’s followers.
To use it, log into ScraperWiki, choose “Create a new dataset” then pick the tool
Then enter the name of the user you want (with or without the @).
If they have a lot of followers it will take a few hours. (And it’ll keep updating after that, so the data is always fresh)
Meanwhile you can use other tools to view the data, download it to Excel and more.
For example, using the “Summarise this data” tool, this is what the people who follow @samuelpepys are into in their Twitter bios.
Or, using the “View in a table” tool, here are my followers who mention Python in their bios, sorted by popularity. (Click for a big version)
I did exactly this a few months ago to publicize a job at ScraperWiki. I found all of the people who followed me, sorted them by follower count and filtered to those interested in Python. I immediately had an easy way to reach the most receptive audience for the job.
Let us know how you use data about Twitter people!
You may think this is clever, but it is an invasion of people’s privacy and goes against every principle of every privacy legislation. This is the kind of behavior that hurts an entire industry.
Hi Martha! Generally our Twitter tools can only access data that’s already public – eg: the follower lists which are accessible via the sidebar on each user’s profile page.
Twitter users who are worried about their privacy can set their profile to “Protected”. Because our Twitter tools use the Twitter OAuth API, they cannot access the followers of a Protected profile, unless you yourself follow that profile. This is perfectly sensible – if you’re able to see a person’s followers, then so is the Get Twitter Followers tool under your control.
In the end, however, we trust our users to act responsibly and within the law. If this topic interests you, you might want to read Francis’ blog post about the legality of scraping from 2012.
Indeed, social network profiles are generally public data. You would easily see this if you’ve used a search engine, like Google or Bing, in the past decade.
Extracting the table of data in this format allows you to see additional details about Twitter followers that is public, but just not viewable on a single page within Twitter.
Keep up the good work!