I want to be able to track page views on my twitter account to see what locations people are viewing from.
Is there a way with twitter or google analytics?
There is no way for you to know anything about who reads your tweets. You can get some basic information about the people who follow you, or the the people that you follow. But the information you describe is not available.
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I've got a bunch of free online HTML, CSS, and JS tutorials under my belt and I want to try using them to make a browser extension. But I want to make sure that the data I want to use is actually accessible before getting started.
My goal is to make a browser extension for twitter.com that shows the number of impressions of any tweet next to the likes, retweets, and replies. My basic idea is to get the status URL of any given tweet, poll the Twitter API for the number of impressions of that tweet, store that in a variable, and then use CSS to display a little eye icon and the number stored in the impressions variable.
I know that I can find the number of impressions of all of my tweets, both through Twitter Analytics, and also just going to my profile page and clicking the little bar chart icon next to views, retweets, etc. But I'm not clear on whether I can do that for other people's tweets via Twitter's API or anything else. Can you?
For the record, I'm not too concerned about the varying definition of "impression," since it will be consistently applied across all tweets and I'm mostly interested in giving users a comparison between tweets. This is part of a research project to see how this might change how people engage with social media if they know how many views a given post has. If there's a simpler way to go about that using existing platforms, I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks for the advice!
No, impressions data is private. If you are authenticated to the Twitter API then you can use the new Twitter Developer Labs Tweets API to get private metrics like impressions, but you cannot get that for other people's Tweets. Also, the Twitter API does not support CORS, so I don't think you'll be successful trying to use it from a browser extension.
When I say that, I mean if I'm creating an APP that I want to work in conjunction with say instagram, twitch, or facebook, etc, where they log in with their account first, how could I go about that? I'd want to essentially do an ADD-ON and make it more accessible/easy for users. Where could I learn more about how to do that?
It sounds a big vague I know, but I'm not sure how else to explain it.
You are looking for an OAUTH API from any of those providers, if I am understanding your post correctly.
You would read the documentation at their relative websites and then apply what is necessary to your project.
More info on facebook here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/oauth
I have some lists of twitter accounts that I would like to recommend on my website (e.g. follow these great crafting bloggers). If I have the twitter ID for each of these people, is it possible to create a list of items that show their twitter info (pic, number of tweets/followers, etc.) as well as controls that allow the user to follow each (or multiple) twitter account? I'd like to be able to do it dynamically based on the list of accounts so that I can update the list and not have to redesign the page. I feel like I've seen this around the web before, but I don't see any widgets for doing it and I'm wondering how it's done.
(I would like to use javascript/jquery, but am pretty flexible here)
Thanks!
Jeff
I would first look at the Twitter API. You will find more information on how Twitter works, and you may find information applicable to what you want to accomplish on your website. It's a start, and there's no better place to start than the source itself.
There have been quite a few number of start-up pertaining to analyzing Twitter data. There is CrowdBooster, then there is Klout, which use Twitter data to tell the user their True reach.
I have got the following two questions:
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter. Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
I have looked through Twitter API and some of the companies that have licensed Twitter's Firehose, but have not found anything that meet my needs.
Also, to give you a short answer to your 2nd question. Now that we've established that view analysis is impossible. Can you find out which user has clicked on that link, absolutely. And depending on what your talking about, user as far as the user who has clicked on the link or the user that has the link on their Twitter stream. Both are possible,
in the case of A, you would get the referring users IP address. Methods vary depending on language.
But what I think your asking for is scenario B, finding out which user has the link in their Twitter stream. This can be done by querying the link, the API response you will get can include tweet entities which will list all this information out for you and more. Open up a firehose with your link and watch what comes in.
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the
number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell
you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
No, in the case of a view - this would be impossible. The tweet impression can happen in multiple silos. On the website, in a widget, in a mobile app. You can imagine that it's simply not possible to get the impression of a tweet on a view because of this reason and because unlike a click, there is no I viewed this tweet identifier sent when a view has been enacted. I spent a great deal of time researching for a way to get the tweet impression even based on a similar clicked link and this is not even possible. (edit: it's possible see the last paragraph) This brings us to question 2.
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter.
Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
Yes, what these websites are mainly doing is analyzing links that you process through their website. If you can have a unique hash marker on a link then analysis becomes possible. Without a unique hash marker, Twitter will re-interrupt two of the same links in a exactly the same way, even in the case that it shortens your link to it's custom t.co wrapper.
This means the only reliable way to do tweet analysis is by including a unique link marker code on your tweet and analyze the the fact that somebody that has hit your server has clicked on that link.
There is a somewhat hidden Twitter API feature that helps you understand how popular a particular link is. That being the link count API .. http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=
Something really outside of the box you can do if your set on analyzing multiple versions of exactly the same link without using markers and if your also using the Streaming (firehose) would be to analyze the tweet views (using the link count API) on similar links that hit your server. The link that got the +1 boost in view is the one that hit your server. But that's about the extent of creative analysis you can get with your tweets and more specifically the links, as mentioned links are the only thing your really able to analyze when it comes to Twitter.
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
Yes, sign up for Twitter Analytics https://analytics.twitter.com (free service provided by Twitter) and you can see how many people view (impressions) for each tweet and totals for specific dates or a date range.
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter. Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
Yes, you can do this. Using a URL shortening service like Bitly.com you can track how many clicks you had from Twitter (only give out that Bitly link on Twitter to do this). But if you want more indept information you may need to create a tracking software, as I don't know of any available. To do that you would need the tracking software to track the link and find out the refer header and see if it's from Twitter (or better yet, just give out a unique URL for your tweets), then you would need to use the Twitter API to find out the handle (username) of that visitor who clicked your link. Lastly store this information in a database so you can review who clicked what link.
Recently search engines have been able to page dynamic content on social networking sites. I would like to understand how this is done. Are there static pages created by a site like Facebook that update semi frequently. Does Google attempt to store every possible user name?
As I understand it, a page like www.facebook.com/username, is not an actual file stored on disk but is shorthand for a query like: select username from users and display the information on the page. How does Google know about every user, this gets even more complicated when things like tweets are involved.
EDIT: I guess I didn't really ask what I wanted to know about. Do I need to be as big as twitter or facebook in order for google to make special ways to crawl my site? Will google automatically find my users profiles if I allow anyone to view them? If not what do I have to do to make that work?
In the case of tweets in particular, Google isn't 'crawling' for them in the traditional sense; they've integrated with Twitter to provide the search results in real-time.
In the more general case of your question, dynamic content is not new to Facebook or Twitter, though it may seem to be. Google crawls a URL; the URL provides HTML data; Google indexes it. Whether it's a dynamic query that's rendering the page, or whether it's a cache of static HTML, makes little difference to the indexing process in theory. In practice, there's a lot more to it (see Michael B's comment below.)
And see Vartec's succinct post on how Google might find all those public Facebook profiles without actually logging in and poking around FB.
OK, that was vastly oversimplified, but let's see what else people have to say..
As far as I know Google isn't able to read and store the actual contents of profiles, because the Google bot doesn't have a Facebook account, and it would be a huge privacy breach.
The bot works by hitting facebook.com and then following every link it can find. Whatever content it sees on the page it hits, it stores. So even if it follows a dynamic url like www.facebook.com/username, it will just remember whatever it saw when it went there. Hopefully in that particular case, it isn't all the private data of said user.
Additionally, facebook can and does provide special instructions that search bots can follow, so that google results don't include a bunch of login pages.
profiles can be linked from outside;
site may provide sitemap