How to get a count of followers from Twitter API and trendline

Question

I am in the process of writing some reports for the number of followers over time for Twitter, however after substantial searches and trial and error, I have not being able to get the number of followers over time - particularly past number of followers.

I know there is an API to get the individual userIds for the followers, but thats an overkill for what I need and I would have to call it everyday. Ideally it would be great if I can pass a date and it could return the number of followers.

Does anyone have any experience with this and what the API might be!

Thanks

Answer 1

While there is no direct API to get the trendline, getting the followers count is fairly easy, access via the URL:

http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?user_id=12345

The documentation has it all @ https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/users/show

To get the trendline, seems like I will need to query it on a daily basis!

Updated to Twitter API v1.1

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json?user_id=12345

Documentation at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/users/show

Updated 31-May-2018

The new API end point is at

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/accounts-and-users/follow-search-get-users/api-reference/get-users-show

Answer 2

Here is a simple PHP exemple using CURL, with no library involved, to get the followers_count of a selected profile (here @TwitterFrance) using v2 API and the bearer token (bearer token is some kind of simplified method to access public data through an OAuth 2.0 API)

$authorization = "Authorization: Bearer YOUREXTRALONGBEARERYOUREXTRALONGBEARERYOUREXTRALONGBEARERYOUREXTRALONGBEARERYOUREXTRALONGBEARERYOUREXTRALONGBEAR";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/json', $authorization));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://api.twitter.com/2/users/by/username/TwitterFrance?user.fields=public_metrics");
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
if (is_string($result)) {
    echo (json_decode($result)->data->public_metrics->followers_count);
    die();
}