Twitter

Workbench uses Twitter standard API. 

Please note that Twitter's search service and, by extension, the Search API is not meant to be an exhaustive source of Tweets. Not all Tweets will be indexed or made available via the search interface.

In this article:

• Load a user tweets

• Search for any tweets

• Load tweets from a public Twitter list

• Automatic data updates

• Data columns

• Retweets and reply counts

• Accumulate tweets

• Filtering tweets to include or exclude languages, retweets, replies, and more

Load a user Tweets

Load up to 3,200 tweets per data update from a specific Twitter account.

1. Select User tweets in the dropdown menu.

2. Enter the handle of the account you wish to pull tweets from.

3. Click Update. 

Search for any tweets

Search for a keyword and load up to 1,000 tweets per data update.

1. Select 'Any tweets' in the dropdown menu.

2. Enter keywords to match.

3. Click Update.

Load tweets from a public Twitter list

Load up to 2000 Tweets from the listed accounts per data update.

1. Select 'Twitter list' in the dropdown menu.

2. Enter the URL of a public Twitter list.

3. Click Update.

Automatic data updates

Set the Update mode to Auto in order to check if new tweets are available on a schedule and automatically load them in your workflow.

Learn more about automatic data update settings and versions.

Data columns

• screen_name: The screen name, handle, or alias that the author of the Tweet identifies themselves with. screen_names are unique but subject to change.

• created_at: UTC time when this Tweet was created.

• text: The actual content of the Tweet.

• in_reply_to_screen_name: If the represented Tweet is a reply, this field will contain the screen name of the original Tweet’s author.

• retweeted_status_screen_name: If the represented Tweet is a re-Tweet, this field will contain the screen name of the original Tweet’s author.

• user_description: The author of the Tweet description of their account.

• source: Utility used to post the Tweet, as an HTML-formatted string. Tweets from the Twitter website have a source value of web.

• lang: When present, indicates a BCP 47 language identifier corresponding to the machine-detected language of the Tweet text, or und (undefined) if no language could be detected. See Twitter documentation.

• id: The unique identifier for this Tweet.

Retweet and reply counts

Both columns are only available when the option Accumulate tweets is NOT enabled. Because of the limited API rates, Workbench would not be able to display all Tweets with up-to-date counts of Retweet and replies, and the information stored in your table would be misleading.

• reply_count: Number of times this Tweet has been replied to.

• retweet_count: Number of times this Tweet has been retweeted.

Accumulate tweets

• Check the option to continuously build a table and add new tweets to old ones during any data updates, and build a large dataset over time.

• Uncheck the option to load new tweets in a new table version during any data updates.

Learn more about automatic update settings and versions here.

Filtering tweets for language, replies, retweets, and more using operators.

With operators that modify its behavior. By using operators, you can focus on data that matters to you and save on your rate limits. 

Here are a few examples: 

To query tweets containing the word 'Notre dame' if written in French, search for:  notre dame lang:fr 

To query tweets containing the word 'Notre dame' if not written in French, search for:  notre dame -lang:fr 

To query tweets containing the word 'puppy' and exclude all retweets, search for:  puppy -filter:retweets 

To query tweets containing the word 'puppy' and exclude all replies, search for:  puppy -filter:replies

To query tweets containing the word 'puppy', exclude all retweets and only include replies search for:  puppy -filter:retweets filter:replies 

More operators: