3 ways to web scrape Twitter data and tweets in 2024

Twitter is a popular social media platform serving as an effective medium for real-time updates. The network allows businesses to form strong communities, engaging with their audience via short and long-form content.

With that vast amount of data and communication between businesses and consumers, there’s a lot of potential. Web scraping is a powerful analytics tactic for gathering user information and obtaining insights.

And we can speed up any Twitter workflow, using smart AI to create content or automation to export data. Download Bardeen, it's free!

When scraping is done correctly, businesses can:

• Scale and automate lead generation
• Understand their audience’s brand perception (demographics, engagement)
• Use trend analytics
• Monitor competitors

You’re about to discover the 3 methods for scraping Twitter data:

• with code (Python is the most popular language)
• without code (using web scraping tools)
• last but not least, using alternative Twitter APIs

Remember to play safe - always consider Twitter's web scraping policy. And if you’re into Twitter automation, why not download Bardeen to speed up?

Why would you scrape Twitter?

Scraping Twitter data allows you to collect information from a vast universe. You can gather posts, user information, hashtags, and other Twitter-specific data in seconds. And Bardeen can help - use the below pre-built playbook (or automation) to grab complete Twitter profile data:

Get Twitter profile data

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Scraping (especially with Twitter automation) can serve a multitude of purposes, from tracking hashtag popularity to finding out what people are saying about a brand.

And there’s even more you can do if you integrate Twitter with Notion, Google Sheets, or popular tools. Bardeen automates the data collection and synchronization with any popular app, saving you time and money.

How to scrape Twitter data using Python

If you’re looking to scrape data with code, Python is one of the most popular coding languages used for scraping. When using Python with libraries such as Tweepy, Snscrape, or Playwright, you can interact with Twitter’s API or scrape the website directly to extract the desired data.

Scraping data using Python is a multi-step process requiring the user to visit two locations: Twitter and the Python software program. Instead, you can use our playbooks to get tweets for any search (without code):

Get tweets for a keyword and save them to Google Sheets

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Anyway, here are the steps for scraping tweets with Python:

1. Set up a Twitter developer account to access Twitter's API.
2. Generate your API keys and access tokens.
3. Install the Python library (e.g., Tweepy, Snscrape) using pip.
4. Authenticate your requests to the Twitter API using your API keys and access tokens.
5. Use the library's functions to scrape tweets. 
6. Export the scraped data into a format of your choice (e.g., CSV, JSON) for analysis.
7. Connect Google Sheets and go crazy with analysis.

Using this method, Tweets can be scraped from:

• a user’s timeline
• a keyword-based filter
• within a date range.

But what if you don’t have time to read all of them? Here’s where Bardeen comes in handy! We can take care of all the above, then use OpenAI to summarize, and finally save that to Google Sheets, Notion, or any other popular tool.

Copy a Twitter thread, summarize it and save to Google Sheets

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Copy a Twitter thread, summarize it and save to Notion

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Using no-code Twitter scraping tools

If you’re looking to scrape without code, dedicated Twitter scraping tools like Apify's can be used as a less technical method. Apify is a cloud platform used for web scraping and browser automation.

Scraping tools like Apify involve using a pre-built software application to extract website data. Often, these applications offer user-friendly interfaces that are designed to scrape Twitter data without programming knowledge.

And if you’re into no-code and automation, let us speed up your workflows. Go ahead and download Bardeen. It’s free!

Here’s how to scrape Twitter without code:

1. Pick a scraping tool that fits your needs.
2. Configure the tool by setting up parameters such as keywords, hashtags, geographical location, language, and the date range of the posts.
3. Start the scraping process and wait for the tool to collect the data.
4. Export the data into a suitable format for further analysis.

When using any free web scraping tool, it’s important not to overload with multiple requests at once. You may be banned if the activity does not seem human-like or natural.

And what’s next? If you’re planning to respond to some posts, why not use our playbook to create tweets with OpenAI?

Create a tweet with OpenAI

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Web scraping with alternative Twitter APIs

APIs allow developers, applications, or systems to communicate with other software systems and access their data, services, or features. APIs can be difficult to manage as company size and access requirements increase.

If you are unable to access Twitter's API or constrained by usage limits, tools like twscrape offer an alternative by creating an unofficial Twitter API. Twscrape allows you to scrape Twitter data using authorized account methods, bypassing the need for API access.

Are you looking to connect with users you’ll scrape? Let Bardeen help, with automation for AI-generating personalized outreach messages, and more.

Create an AI-generated Twitter DM

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Here is how to use twscrape to scrape Twitter data:

1. Install twscrape via pip.
2. Add Twitter accounts to twscrape to work around API usage limits.
3. Use twscrape's functions to scrape tweets, user profiles, or search results based on your criteria.
4. Export the scraped data for analysis.

Remember, while scraping Twitter data can provide valuable insights, it's essential to respect privacy, minimize impact on Twitter's servers, and adhere to legal and ethical guidelines. Scraping is completely legal if the data gathered is considered openly available.

Get deeper insights and save time, just download our Chrome extension. Here, you can access Bardeen's prebuilt playbooks and app integrations for free.

What’s Twitter's web scraping policy?

Understanding scraping policies is essential to avoid legal consequences. Data that can be scraped on Twitter includes publicly available data, meaning anything visible without logging into the platform.

Examples of prohibited actions:

• scraping private profiles, their data cannot be exported, shared, or used for data purposes
• scraping tweet data containing copyrighted material such as video content or images cannot be used

To understand the complete limitations of Twitter scraping, make sure to review their policy.

We already know how much time and energy automation saves. Scraping data or connecting Twitter with Google Sheets, Notion, and your favorite CRM takes minutes. Whether you're aiming to analyze tweet sentiments, gather data for content creation, or monitor specific Twitter profiles, we’ve got you covered.

With app integrations that allow performing any task, actions, and personalizing workflows. This is made possible with our automations or playbooks. Users can create a playbook or use one of the prebuilt templates to automate tasks.

Here are some of the most popular ways to automate your Twitter workflows:

1. Are you following any tweets? Why not scrape data from specific tweets and conversation threads? That should simplify analyzing discussions and gathering comprehensive data on specific topics. Here’s how:

Get data from a Tweet and its thread

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2. Let’s take it one level higher - we can also automate collecting detailed information from Twitter profiles. How much time will you save when building the next database of influences, competitors, or leads?

Get Twitter profile data

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3. If you prefer using Airtable, what would you say to transferring Twitter profile info quickly? It’s perfect for organizing/analyzing Twitter data for marketing, networking, or research.

Save Twitter profile to Airtable

Automate Airtable + Twitter

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