November Is Social Data Month!

The few weeks after Tableau Conference is always a busy time in the social media lives of the Tableau community. Viz enthusiasts are connecting with the friends they made at conference on Twitter, new blogs are popping up, and Tableau Public’s website just added follow features to make it more social! That’s why the month of November is going to be Social Data Month!

Throughout this month, you’ll see tutorials and use cases for analyzing Twitter, Facebook, and other kinds of social media data. To whet your appetite here’s a little project I put together looking at my new Twitter followers over the past year:

I used two different data sources to put this viz together. First, I have an IFTTT recipe running that writes a row in a Google Spreadsheet every time I get a new follower on Twitter. I set up this recipe last December and just let it run. This way even if someone doesn’t STAY a follower, I at least have a record that they followed me at some point.

I wanted to compare who followed me throughout the year with who is currently following me. I knew that all those people couldn’t still be following me, otherwise my current number of followers should be much higher. I used the free follower report from Simply Measured to get a list of who is currently following me.

To figure out who followed me at some point but then stopped following me, I made a blend of the two datasets and then wrote a calculation that looks like this “IFNULL(ATTR([Follower List (Free_Twitter_Follower_Report_on_jeweloree_(11_03_2015-11_10_2015_PST))].[Screen Name]),"Not Currently Following")” Using this calculation I was able to color on and filter out all of the people who are no longer following me.

We are going to be highlighting social media vizzes on Viz of the Day and on Twitter all month, so if you have a viz to share or some tips for working with social media data, send them to @tableaupublic!

*Header image courtesy of Yoel Ben-Avraham