Identifying social media influencers is both an art and a science. Let’s use network analysis to help find them on Twitter.

My dog loves napping in his super-fuzzy dog bed. And I have to confess: I like to think I’m a rational consumer, but I bought him the bed because of cute photos and a discount code shared by a social media influencer.

Identifying social media influencers who can help promote your business is both an art and a science. There are plenty of commercial services that say they can tell you who those people are. But why pay for that service when you can use a tool already at your fingertips to find and analyze potential influencers and their posts? Alteryx has network analysis capabilities that can help you identify these people and determine whether they’re a good fit for your needs.

Let’s take a closer look at the  Network Analysis Tool and build our own workflow to identify potential Twitter influencers.

Image via  GIPHY

Retrieving and Preparing Tweets

A while back, I  demonstrated how to retrieve and analyze tweets using the Twitter API, the user-created  Twitter API Authorization Header macro, and the Sentiment Analysis Tool from the  Alteryx Intelligence Suite.

You can use the approach and workflow provided in that post to get started on our influencer identifier. You might choose a keyword, a location, or — as I will do here — a hashtag relevant to your interests as your starting point.

I’m going to look at tweets with the hashtag #ODSCEast from the recent  Open Data Science Conference East. One use for these tweets could be identifying influencers who might be helpful in promoting our  Data Science Mixer podcast and/or could be future guests.

#analytics #data-analysis #data-science #node #nodejs