Building a Social Media Sentiment Analyzer Using Airbyte and Twitter API

Social media has become an important medium for communication, brand marketing, and campaigning. Platforms like Twitter offer a wealth of data that can tell about public sentiments on any global topic, product, or service. Analyzing this data can help refine marketing strategies and generate more favorable outcomes.

Let’s learn about Twitter sentiment analysis in detail and how to build a sentiment analyzer using Twitter API. By leveraging a sentiment analyzer, you can gather and analyze Twitter data to gain meaningful insights for informed decision-making.

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a technique of analyzing textual data to evaluate if the emotional tone of the text is positive, negative, or neutral. This process involves extracting text-based data from emails, social media posts, comments, customer service chats, or product reviews.

The extracted data is cleaned by removing punctuations and stopwords. After cleaning, data is analyzed using various methods, like rule-based, lexicon-based, or machine learning-based techniques. These processes often leverage natural language processing tasks like contextual modeling to understand the sentiments. The sentiments are then categorized into pre-defined groups.

Why Conduct Sentiment Analysis with Twitter Data?

Twitter sentiment analysis helps you to explore public opinion on popular topics. Some of the reasons for which you should conduct Twitter sentiment analysis include:

Understanding Market Trends

Twitter sentiment analysis enables you to identify what is trending in your industry. By monitoring hashtags, keywords, and customer tweets, you can assess user reactions to your competitor's products, marketing campaigns, and developments. This insight enables you to understand user interests and refine your product development roadmap and marketing strategies accordingly. Such competitor analysis can help you identify the business areas where your business can improve to stay competitive.

Evaluating Customer Sentiment

You can enhance the profitability of your business if you offer products or services that meet your customers’ requirements. Tweet sentiment analysis allows you to track how users perceive your offerings. Further, monitoring positive or negative sentiments will provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction.

Crisis Management

If the sentiment analysis indicates a rise in negative sentiments toward your product, you can check for potential issues within your products or services. You can also extract particular texts from tweets using methods like OCR to understand specific customer complaints. This analysis enables you to take corrective measures and manage situations that can harm your business’s reputation.

If you want to use Twitter data for any of the reasons mentioned above, you can build your own Twitter sentiment analyzer.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Social Media Sentiment Analyzer Using Airbyte and Twitter API

To build a Twitter sentiment analyzer, you must first collect relevant data, including tweets, customer profiles, ads, or search queries. For effective data extraction, you can use Airbyte, a powerful data movement platform that offers a vast library of 550+ pre-built connectors, including Twitter. This lets you quickly extract the necessary data to develop a Twitter sentiment analyzer. 

There are two main approaches for building a Twitter sentiment analyzer using Airbyte, each suited to different needs and technical setups. Let's break them down:

Approach 1: Using PyAirbyte

PyAirbyte is an open-source Python library that provides a set of utilities for using Airbyte connectors in Python-based workflows. If you’re familiar with Python and want control over the data extraction process, PyAirbyte is a great choice. 

Step 1: Install PyAirbyte

Install PyAirbyte using the following code:

pip install airbyte

Step 2: Configure Twitter as Source Connector

Configure Twitter as a source connector using the code below:

import airbyte as ab

# Define Twitter source configuration
twitter_config = {
    "credentials": {
        "access_token": "your_access_token",
        "access_token_secret": "your_access_token_secret",
        "consumer_key": "your_consumer_key",
        "consumer_secret": "your_consumer_secret",
    },
 },
}

source = ab.get_source(
    "source-twitter",
    config=twitter_config,
    install_if_missing=True,
)

You will get the access_token, access_token_secret, consumer_key, and consumer_secret_key after signing up for a Twitter developer account.

Step 3: Verify Configuration and Credentials

To verify the source configuration and credentials, execute the following command:

source.check()

Step 4: Check Available Data Streams

Check the data streams that the Twitter connector can access to understand the type of data that you can extract from Twitter. This can include tweets, ads, or search queries.

source.get_available_streams()

Step 5: Select the Required Data Streams

If you want to include all the available data streams in your data pipeline, you can use this command:

source.select_all_streams()

Alternatively, you can use select_streams() to select only the required subset of the streams.

Step 6: Read Data into the Local Cache

Load extracted data into a local cache for temporary storage by executing the following code:

cache = ab.get_default_cache()
result = source.read(cache=cache)

Airbyte supports SQL caches such as DuckDB, PostgreSQL, and BigQuery, and you can use any of them according to your requirements.

Step 7: Convert Cached Data into Pandas DataFrame

To ensure consistency, you can clean and transform the cached Twitter data. To do this, you can first convert it into Pandas DataFrame using the command below.

df = cache["your_stream"].to_pandas()

You can then load the standardized data to a PyAirbyte-supported destination.

Step 8: Perform Sentiment Analysis

You can now conduct a sentiment analysis of the Twitter data stored in the destination system using Python. As Twitter data is mostly textual, you need to install some essential libraries to perform Python text analysis. This includes Natural Language Toolkit (NLKT), spaCy, TextBlob, PyTorch, and Scikit-learn.

Using Python libraries like NLKT, you can break down large texts into small groups through the tokenization technique. You may also perform stemming and lemmatization processes to streamline your textual data.

To enhance your analysis, you can also use the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER). It is a rule-based sentiment analysis model that helps you perform effective social media sentiment analysis.

Here is a code demonstrating Twitter sentiment analysis using VADER:

# Import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer class from vaderSentiment.vaderSentiment module.
from vaderSentiment.vaderSentiment import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer

# Function to print sentiments of the sentence.
def sentiment_scores(sentence):

    # Create a SentimentIntensityAnalyzer object.
    sid_obj = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()

    # polarity_scores method of SentimentIntensityAnalyzer object gives a sentiment dictionary.
    # which contains pos, neg, neu, and compound scores.
    sentiment_dict = sid_obj.polarity_scores(sentence)
    
    print("Overall sentiment dictionary is: ", sentiment_dict)
    print("Sentence was rated as", sentiment_dict['neg']*100, "% Negative")
    print("Sentence was rated as", sentiment_dict['neu']*100, "% Neutral")
    print("Sentence was rated as", sentiment_dict['pos']*100, "% Positive")

    print("Sentence Overall Rated As", end=" ")

    # Decide sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral based on the compound score
    if sentiment_dict['compound'] >= 0.05:
        print("Positive")
    elif sentiment_dict['compound'] <= -0.05:
        print("Negative")
    else:
        print("Neutral")

# Example tweets for testing the function
if __name__ == "__main__":

    print("\n1st Tweet:")
    sentence = "I love the new features on Twitter!"
    sentiment_scores(sentence)

    print("\n2nd Tweet:")
    sentence = "The new changes on Twitter are confusing and frustrating."
    sentiment_scores(sentence)

    print("\n3rd Tweet:")
    sentence = "Just another normal day with nothing special happening."
    sentiment_scores(sentence)

VADER allows you to assign a compound score to each word based on its emotional tone. The compound score varies from -1 (most negative) to +1 (most positive). You can classify the tweets based on compound scores as follows:

• Compound Score < -0.05: Negative Sentiments
• Compound Score > 0.05: Positive Sentiments
• Compound Score between -0.05 and 0.05: Neutral Sentiments

Step 9: Visualize Results

After analysis, you can create visual dashboards using Python visualization libraries like Matplotlib and Seaborn. Using these visuals, you can better understand the sentiments for your specific use cases.

Approach 2: Using Airbyte Cloud 

Here is a detailed step-by-step guide for building a Twitter sentiment analyzer using Airbyte Cloud:

Step 1: Set Up Twitter as a Source Connector

Let’s first set up Twitter as a source connector in Airbyte using the following steps:

1. Login to your Airbyte Cloud account.
2. On the dashboard, click Sources from the left navigation pane. Enter Twitter in the Search box.

3. You will be directed to the Create a Source page.

4. Next, enter your Twitter API credentials. For the Access Token field, enter the App only Bearer Token, which is used to authenticate Twitter API.
5. In the Search Query field, you can enter the query for the matching Tweets. To build these queries, you can refer to the Build a Query guide.
6. To set up the Start Date (Optional), you can enter the date in YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ format. The start date should not be earlier than the past 7 days.
7. For the End Date (Optional), enter the date in YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ format, and it should be a minimum of 10 seconds before the request time.
8. Finally, click the Set up Source button.

Step 2: Set Up a Destination Connector

Next, you should configure a destination data system to store your extracted tweets. In this tutorial, we are using Google BigQuery as a destination.

1. Click on Destinations from the left navigation pane and enter BigQuery in the Search box.
2. You will be redirected to the Create a Destination page. Here, enter the necessary fields, including Google Cloud Project ID and the Dataset Location.

3. For Default Dataset ID, enter your BigQuery Dataset ID. According to your requirements, select Batch Standard Inserts or GCS Staging as Loading Method.
4. You can enter the Google Cloud Service Account Key in JSON format in the Service Account Key JSON field. This is optional for Airbyte Open-source but mandatory for Cloud accounts.
5. Lastly, click the Set up Destination button.

Step 3: Create Connection

You can now proceed to create a connection between source and destination connectors using the following steps:

1. From the left side of the navigation pane, click Connections and then choose the source and destination that you just created in the above steps.
2. Next, choose the streams and mode. You can then configure the connection by providing the mandatory fields like sync frequency.
3. Click Set up Connection.

4. After this, you will be redirected to the connection overview page. Here, you can track your connection by using various tabs, including Status, Schema, or Timeline.

After completion of the first sync, you can ensure whether the sync is completed or not by checking the data in the destination.

You can monitor the progress to ensure successful data transfer. By setting up this Airbyte connection, you can store the data extracted from Twitter in BigQuery tables. After this, you can integrate Airbyte with dbt, a command line tool, to clean and transform the data into a standardized format.

Step 4: Analyze Twitter Sentiments Using MindsDB

To perform sentiment analysis, you can integrate BigQuery with MindsDB, an open-source platform that enables you to connect various data storage systems with AI models. Using these models, you can analyze and classify your Twitter data sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral. You can then create a new BigQuery table to store your predictions.

Step 6: Visualize the Results

Lastly, integrate the BigQuery table containing analysis results with a suitable BI tool like Looker, Power BI, or Tableau to create interactive dashboards. By using these visualizations, you can make well-informed interpretations of Twitter sentiments.

This completes the process of analyzing Twitter sentiments using Airbyte and Twitter API.

Some of the additional beneficial features of Airbyte are as follows:

• Flexibility to Develop Custom Connectors: You can build your own custom connectors in Airbyte. It offers multiple options for this, such as Connector Builder, Low Code Connector Development Kit (CDK), Python CDK, and Java CDK.‍
• AI-powered Connector Builder: While building custom connectors using Airbyte’s Connector Builder, you can utilize an AI assistant. It pre-fills the configuration fields and provides intelligent suggestions to fine-tune the connector development process.‍
• Change Data Capture (CDC): The CDC feature of Airbyte allows you to capture incremental changes made at the source data system and replicate them into the destination. Using CDC, you can ensure that the source and destination data systems are in sync.‍
• Support for Vector Databases: Airbyte supports vector databases like Pinecone, Weaviate, or Chroma. If your extracted data is unstructured or semistructured, you can directly load it into these Airbyte-supported vector databases for efficient GenAI workflow operations.‍
• RAG Transformations: You can integrate Airbyte with LLM frameworks like LangChain or LlamaIndex to perform RAG transformations like indexing or chunking. This helps you improve the outcomes generated by LLMs.

What's more? See how Abhiraj Created User Sentiment Analysis Using Airbyte

Let’s look at one real-world example where one of Airbyte’s users, Abhiraj Adhikary, conducted a sentiment analysis of Dropbox reviews using Airbyte. He adopted the following approach:

• Abhiraj used Airbyte to extract Dropbox reviews and store them in DuckDB.
• He then utilized the TextBlob library to evaluate the polarity (positive or negative sentiment) and subjectivity (factual or opinionated content) of reviews.
• Finally, using Streamlit, an open-source Python framework, Abhiraj created a visual dashboard of the outcomes of sentiment analysis.

Special thanks to Abhiraj for demonstrating how Airbyte can be used for successful sentiment analysis. To learn more about this, you can click here!

Conclusion

Social media sentiment analysis is critical to improving market research, customer service, and advertising campaigns. This blog gives you a brief overview of sentiment analysis and a step-by-step guide on building a Twitter sentiment analyzer using Airbyte and Twitter API. You can use this method to conduct a Twitter sentiment analysis and leverage its results to enhance your organizational operations.