Connecting 'Tweet counts' API to Data Studio using a Community Connector

The moment I lay my eyes on this API, it instantly occurred to me that we could very easily try and create something similar to Google Trends, just for a much smaller frequency though (7 days).

Demo

You can create a data source using this connector directly by navigating to the following link —
https://datastudio.google.com/datasources/create?connectorId=AKfycbzHF4sg2NSUsJuVMkROxHcLn1g2sPquWKGjBuLXiHa1gXmcXtNwBbxkeSTEsRQAFKJM

Note: You'll need to have/create a Twitter Developer Account to get a Bearer token, which will be needed as the "key" to power this connector/endpoint.

Architecture

For the most part this connector is pretty similar to the one I'd created for visualising global stats of SendGrid user’s email statistics but with a key difference of making use of overridable config parameters — this is what gives the connector the capability to accept a query from the report directly and return/visualize the data based on a user's input 🔥

Codebase

You can access the entire script on my GitHub repository here or make a copy of this script here.

Gotchas

Here are some of the caveats you may want to take into account too —

1. You'll require a Bearer token from Twitter as this endpoint only supports the "app-only" authentication — meaning: if you were to use an auth token granted by OAuth 2.0 via another user, the API would simply fail citing that no user-context credentials can be used to fetch the data 😤
2. While I am using the YEAR_MONTH_DAY_SECOND SemanticType when generating the timestamp dimension that's being returned by Twitter, the connector still only detects it to be a Date & Time data type as opposed to the Date Hour Minute one —

• It's a bit of a pain because the time series chart in Data Studio otherwise fails to render, citing that there were too many rows — factually impossible because the Tweet counts API only returns the last 7 days worth of data with the smallest granularity being that of minutes => 7*24*60 => 10080 + 1 (header) rows

• Which is a long way to say that though the template is set to assume the Date Hour Minute data type, every time someone new tries to configure the connector on their own, they'll still end-up with the Date & Time data type as the default and will need to manually set it to Date Hour Minute (please don't hate me for that 😅)

Pro tip

• I'd highly recommend making use of Twitter's query builder tool as it can help accurately filter and group specific components of whatever it is that you're looking for. Here's an example snapshot —

• Since you've been so kind as to read all the way through, in case you don't want to set up a Twitter Developer Account of your own or are having issues setting up the Data Studio connector altogether and still want to experience the magic of the kind of data you can gather from this report, just DM on Twitter with a request to play with the dashboard that I've created (using my credentials) and I'd be happy to share. Can't do so publicly as it would most certainly run out of quotas 😅