Gather data from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn of 250 people

Question

I'm currently doing research on social media usage. We (my research partner and I) target a group of 250 people. We 'test' them with on the following indicators:

Twitter

If they have a Twitter account:

• How many tweets on date A and date B do they have(for an average amount in a period of time)?
• How many followers on date A and date B (for an average amount in a period of time)?
• How many times are his/her tweets retweeted between date A and B?

Facebook

If they have a Facebook account:

• How many friends on date A and date B (same reason as for Twitter)?
• How many likes on date A and date B (same reason as for Twitter)?

Linked-In

• If they have a LinkedIn account, how many connections on date A and date B (same reasons as for Twitter)?

By 'the amount on date A and date B' -> I mean the total amount of ex. tweets he/she had on that date, not the newly created tweets on that date.

I know I have to collect all those usernames by myself. But when talking about collecting the data: Is there any way I could automate this? What tools do you recommend ? I've seen a lot of Twitter/FB analysis tools, but none seem to do exactly what I want (although the tool doesn't need to make an average amount over time (Excel can do that), it should be able to analyze the total amount of tweets/likes etc on a certain date).

Answer 1

If you are willing to spend money, Radian6 (social media analysis by Salesforce.com) do a great job. But if you want to save money, then what you are asking is relatively simple, but most likely won't be available in one free app. You will want to look for freewares that can interact with twitter/linkedin/facebook API and take a snapshot at the desired time frame. If you know how to code, Python scripts can easily help you do the following. If you don't, that would require more research. I have seen a lot of analysis software that can do one account well, and can export, but not easily researching multiple.