Sifting for Deeper Insights from Your Social Media Data

Here you'll find almost everything you need to get started collecting and analyzing your social media data.

To collect Twitter data using the Twitter API you'll need the following files:
https://github.com/isaacobezo/twitter_streams
If you have any questions please reach Isaac Obezo @iobezo

To collect Twitter and other social media channels using DataSift you'll need to download the following files:
http://tabsoft.co/1tgcRL8
For questions please contact Mike Klaczynski @mikeklacy

1) You'll need to have access to a MySQL database, ask your IT department if they can create an account for you. If they can't give you an account see if they can help you create a database and provision a user. Once you know you have somewhere to store the data, let's actually go and collect some social posts.

2) Head on over to www.datasift.com and create a new account. You'll be given $10 for free to get started and collect your first set of data. This should be enough for about 100,000 tweets.

3) Next you'll need to figure out what data you want to collect, use the following stream as a sample and modify it to collect your own brands data: https://datasift.com/essence/tsjtaz
Once you're done you'll have your first stream, it's a "recipe" you'll use to actually start "cooking" social media from the web.

4) Now we need to setup that MySQL database so that we can send it data from our "recipe". Use your credentials to access your MySQL server, next we'll need to run several commands to create a new database, give it a schema, and grant a user privileges to access it. Use the files you downloaded earlier, they contain the scripts you can copy and paste into your MySQL Workbench or command prompt. Make sure to change the database name to the actual name you're using as well as use a valid user name.

5) Now that you have a database setup that is ready to receive data from DataSift, we need to show DataSift how to communicate with it. Enter your database information and then upload the "DataSift - Mapping File for data destination" to the new MySQL Data Destination.

6) The hard part is done! Now go to "Tasks", choose "Start a Recording", choose your stream, your start and end date, select your MySQL data destination, and your cooking. Now it's time to "eat" some of that social data in Tableau.

7) Open up Tableau and use the MySQL connector to connect to your database. (Make sure you have the MySQL drivers installed, otherwise you'll get a connection error). You should see several tables, connect to the "Interactions" table and start exploring! Once you are familiar with those fields you can join in additional tables.

8) Use the "Social Media Template" as a start for some of your deeper analytics. To replace the data source, simply connect to your MySQL DB and then choose "Replace Data Source" on the old data. The data included with the workbook is limited to just the first day of each month in order to minimize size. Once you are done replacing the data source you can close the old connections to reduce your workbooks size.