For many years the Twitter API remained “approval-only” where developers had to apply for access to obtain a Twitter API Key, then wait a few days (or weeks) and hope Twitter would approve them.
But on November 15th, 2021 this all changed for the better with Twitter Ushering in a new era for the Twitter Developer Platform and launching “Essential” access to their API with no approval needed.
We’ll show you how to sign up for this excellent new offering and begin using the Twitter Data API immediately.
1. Log In to Twitter
Head over to the Twitter Eseential Access Link where you’ll be asked to sign in to Twitter (if you aren’t already). Just enter your Twitter login credentials and continue (always double check you’re on an official twitter.com URL before providing your password):
2. Answer 4 Simple Questions
Once you’ve clicked the Essential Access Link and confirmed your Twitter login information, you’ll be asked four simple questions (be sure to scroll down the page or else you may miss them):
If you don’t have a use case in mind yet, you can just enter Exploring the API for the 3rd question. Then click Next.
3. Accept the Developer Agreement
Carefully read every. single. word. of the Developer agreement & policy and then check the box when you’re done and click Submit:
You then may need to verify your email, just click the link they send you:
4. Name Your App
The Twitter API is organized around “Apps” that you create and manage (and get Twitter API Keys for). You’ll now be asked to pick a name for your app (which you can change later). Pick a unique name like Stevesie Twitter Data Scraper (its a global name, so it needs to truly be unique) and click Get keys:
5. Get Your Twitter API Keys
You’ll now have the keys you need to access the Twitter API:
Copy these keys to a password manager (or somewhere safe), as this is the only time Twitter will show them to you. You will need the Bearer Token for scraping data, so be sure to save this somewhere safe!
I Lost My Keys!
If you ever lose your Twitter API Keys or need to re-generate them, simply head to the Twitter Developer Dashboard and select your project on the left hand of the screen under “Projects & Apps”, then select “Keys and tokens” right under your apps name:
You can then regenerate any token you need - you’ll just need the Bearer Token for scraping public Twitter data, so you can always regenerate it (but save it and try not to lose it to avoid doing this step again).
6. Scrape Some Twitter Data
To test our your new keys for scraping Twitter data, we only need the Bearer Token which we can copy from the previous step:
We’ll perform a quick test using the Official Twitter API Search Tweets Endpoint which you can access using this link. Follow the instructions and make an HTTP request with the Authorization header set to Bearer <YOUR_BEARER_TOKEN> and you’ll get back Twitter data.
If this sounds too complicated, you can use the Stevesie Data Tweets & Archive Search integration to quickly scrape data back. Just provide a search query and your Bearer Token:
Execute the endpoint and you’ll get back up to 100 Tweets matching your query that you can download in CSV format:
7. Monitor Your Twitter API Usage
The basic level of access allows you to scrape up to 10,000 Tweets per month. You can track your usage in the Twitter Developer Portal under the “Project” section:
You’ll see that we used up 100 Tweets of our quota because we got back 100 Tweets from step 6.
Scraping Twitter at Scale
If you want to use up the full 10,000 Tweets you’re afforded each month, check out the other Twitter Data API Scraping Integrations the Stevesie Platform supports. Specifically, check out the workflow formulas which allow you to scrape bulk data from many Twitter endpoints automatically, which is very useful for collecting thousands or millions of historical Tweets about a topic that interests you.