Twitter Followers per Day from Social Blade

social_blade_twitter.R

## Helper function to preview ggplots
## thanks to @tjmahr for sharing!
ggpreview <- function (..., device = "png") {
    fname <- tempfile(fileext = paste0(".", device))
    ggplot2::ggsave(filename = fname, device = device, ...)
    system2("open", fname)
    invisible(NULL)
}  

## install pacman if you don't have it
pacman::p_load(tidyverse, rvest, glue, ggrepel, emo)

## my social blade data
social_html <- read_html("https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/favstats/monthly") 

## function to scrape social blade data
get_social_data <- function(x) {
  date <- social_html %>% 
  html_nodes(xpath = glue("/html/body/div[10]/div[1]/div[{x}]/div[1]")) %>% 
  html_text()
  
  daily_follower <- social_html %>% 
  html_nodes(xpath = glue("/html/body/div[10]/div[1]/div[{x}]/div[3]/div[1]/span")) %>% 
  html_text()
  
  tibble(date, daily_follower)
}

## scraping and cleaning
social_data <- 5:34  %>% 
  map_dfr(get_social_data) %>% 
  mutate(daily_follower = ifelse(daily_follower == "--", 0, parse_number(daily_follower))) %>% 
  mutate(date = lubridate::as_date(date)) %>% 
  mutate(pos_neg = ifelse(daily_follower >= 0, "pos", "neg"))


## graph
ggtwitter <- social_data %>% 
  ggplot(aes(date, daily_follower)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_line(size = 0.5) +
  geom_text_repel(data = social_data %>% filter(daily_follower >= 5), 
                  aes(label = daily_follower), 
                  nudge_y = 1, nudge_x = 0.5, 
                  direction = "y") +
  theme_minimal() +
  geom_hline(yintercept = 0, linetype = "dashed", color = "grey") +
  annotate(geom = "text", x = as.Date("2019-01-06"), y = 62, 
           label = ji_glue(":open_mouth:Hadley Wickham retweets me:open_mouth:")) +
  annotate(geom = "text", x = as.Date("2019-01-04") + 0.35, y = 14,
           label = ji_glue("Tweet about Rstudio Cloud :cloud:")) +
  labs(x = "", y = "Twitter Followers per Day\n", 
       title = "Welcome to all my new Twitter Followers!",
       subtitle = "Beware: You will encounter a lot of R. And Memes\n",
       caption = "Data from Social Blade") +
  scale_x_date(date_breaks = "4 day", date_labels = "%d %b %Y") +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(size = 14, face = "bold"), 
        plot.subtitle = element_text(face = "italic"))

## preview plot with this awesome function
# ggpreview(width = 10, height = 6)

ggsave("ggtwitter.png", width = 10, height = 6)

## Tweet with Graph can be found here: https://twitter.com/favstats/status/1083330490915086336

Yes, this is not working indeed! Seems like they closed the opportunity to retrieve data from their website like this. You can check out RSelenium (https://github.com/ropensci/RSelenium) to scrape the website anyway.