Twitter API Following Scraper
IMPORTANT: Twitter updated their policy for the follows endpoints to now require Enterprise API Access starting at $42,000/mo. If this is out of reach, you can use the HAR File Web Scraper to manually scrape follower lists from the Twitter website. Please see this video for more information on scraping Twitter with HAR Files.
If you’re interested in seeing who other Twitter accounts follow, then this endpoint shown above will query the Twitter API on your behalf and collect back the outbound following list, up to 1,000 returned users objects per API request. Just provide the user ID of the user for whom to return results.
This is separate from the followers list (which you can also consider as someone’s “following,” making the naming here a little confusing). If you need to scrape a follower list (people who are following a given account), please see our Twitter Followers Scraper.
Why Scrape Following Lists?
But why would you want to scrape the accounts another account is following? There are a few reasons, e.g. if you’re part of a Twitter “ring” (where people follow each other), you may want to track this information to enforce that people don’t unfollow people in the ring.
You may also want to see what your own followers are interested in, so you can look at what other Twitter accounts they follow to understand what they’re interested in. Specifically if you see patterns where several of your followers are all following the same account, then you may want to “borrow” some content ideas from that account.