Recently, I had an requirement from my team if we can retrieve twitter data and do some visualization out of it to make some analysis. After going to through several blogs I pounced on blog from TableauJunkie on WDC on twitter and extract the data for analysis. Please look at the below dashboard I created for #TrudeauInIndia from Twitter
Following are the steps:
Step 1: Create your own Twitter API key to return the results
once you create your API, twitter will provide access keys which will be used to provide search results.
For Tableau, we will need Web data connector for Twitter. I have used the web data connector shared by Alex ross on this blog Tableau Junkie:
http://tableaujunkie.com/post/119681578798/creating-a-twitter-web-data-connector
one can download the code and set up your own website or localhost to host the connector. There is also an option to modify the number of tweets count one needs.
Step 2: I used XAMP on my machine and pasted the files onto htdocs folder to host the connector on localhost.
Step 3: Start Tableau –> more –> web data connector –> enter the URL where you are hosting the files. Most probably it will be:
http://localhost/TwitterSearch/twitterwebconnect.html
Enter the hashtag or twitter account you want to search
Step 4: Go to Sheet and start creating your data visualization
Hope this will help you in future to generate twitter trends using Tableau