How to get tweets, their retweets/favs for tracked users, in realtime?

Question

I'm currently working on project where I need to track about 7500 twitter users.

Is there a way to get tweets, their retweets and favs in realtime? I can't find possibility to do that using Twitter API.

The only way we figured out is to do direct scraping of user timelines, but it's pretty inefficient and not in realtime.

If anyone have other idea, let me know, thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the streaming API to get tweets in realtime from specific users by settings follow to their user IDs. You can get the IDs using the regular REST API if you only have their screen names. The tweets returned include tweets the user makes, retweets (both by and of the user), and replies to the user.

There is no way to get any user's favorites from the streaming API, the only way to get those is with favorites/list in the REST API, which is limited to 15 requests per 15 minutes, 200 favorites in each response, and only one user per request.