R: Connect to Twitter with R

You can do a lot in the way of text analytics with Twitter. But in order to do so, first you need to connect with Twitter.

In order to do so, first you need to set up an account on Twitter and get an API key. Once you have created your account, go to the following website: https://dev.twitter.com/

Once there, click My apps

Click Create New App

Give name, description (it doesn’t matter – matter anything up), for website I just used http://test.de

Go to Keys and Access Tokens

Get your Consumer Key (API Key), Consumer Secret (API Secret), Access Token, and Access Token Secret

Now open R and install the TwitteR package.

install.packages("twitteR")

Now load the library

library(twitteR)

Next we are going to use the API keys you collected to authorize our connection to the Twitter API (Twitter uses OAuth by the way)

api_key<- "insert consumer key here"
api_secret <- "insert consumer secret here"
access_token <- "insert access token here"
access_token_secret <- "insert access token secret here
setup_twitter_oauth(api_key,api_secret,access_token,access_token_secret)

Now to test to see if your connection is good

searchTwitter('analytics')