In friep/smcounts: Collect Social Media Follower Counts for Different Platforms

knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE, eval = FALSE)

Installation

When on Raspberry Pi / Linux, try installing the dependencies with {bspm} first. This will install the packages as binaries instead of compiling them from source, speeding up the installation of {smcounts} later.

install.packages("bspm")
bspm::enable()
install.packages(c("magrittr", "httr", "lubridate", "stringr", "tibble", "glue", "rtweet", "slackr", "here"))

Then install from GitHub using {remotes} (select "none" when it asks you about whether you want to update packages):

remotes::install_github("friep/smcounts")

Usage

After setting up the necessary authentication files (see below), you can use {smcounts} as follows:

library(smcounts)
library(dplyr)

fb <- ca_facebook()
tw <- ca_twitter()
mc <- ca_newsletter()
sl <- ca_slack()

# bind them together
all <- bind_rows(fb, tw, mc, sl)

Or use collect_data to get all platforms (with default arguments to the individual functions):

all <- collect_data()

You can turn off specific platforms (e.g. when you don't need it or if you need to pass custom arguments):

all_except_slack <- collect_data(slack = FALSE)

helper functions

You can use mailchimp_lists to find out the id of the audience you want to track:

mailchimp_lists() %>% bind_rows() %>%  as_tibble()

Setup

Depending on which functions you want to use, you'll need:

for slack: a .slackr file, see https://github.com/hrbrmstr/slackr.
a .Renviron file containing several variables:

MAILCHIMP_KEY="mailchimp api key"
MAILCHIMP_LIST_ID="list id of audience"
FB_USER_ID="your personal user id"
FB_PAGE_ID="page id"
FB_APP_ID="app id of app that you created in the developer portal"
FB_APP_SECRET="app secret of app that you created in the developer portal"
FB_PAGE_TOKEN="the never-expiring page token that you generated (see below)"

Facebook Authentication

Facebook Authentication is a mess. Finding the page ID in the user interface was quite hard - the UI changes constantly. Just click around on your page and hope you'll find it (it is not the URL part of your page...).

This site is a good overview: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/pages/access-tokens.

After a lot of digging, this is what I came up with to generate a (hopefully) never expiring page access token:

readRenviron(".Renviron")
page_id <- Sys.getenv("FB_PAGE_ID")
app_id <- Sys.getenv("FB_APP_ID")
app_secret <- Sys.getenv("FB_APP_SECRET")

# get page access token without expiration
# first, we need a long-lived user access token - for that we need a short-lived user access token
# get a short lived user access token using the graph explorer tool https://graph.facebook.com/v9.0/
# make sure to give the page_insights permission (Category "Other")
fb_user_short_lived <- "YOUR SHORT LIVED TOKEN"
user_at_url <- glue::glue("https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?grant_type=fb_exchange_token&client_id={app_id}&client_secret={app_secret}&fb_exchange_token={fb_user_short_lived}")

res <- httr::GET(user_at_url)
fb_user_long_lived <- httr::content(res, type = "application/json")$access_token

# get page accesstoken
# If you used a long-lived User access token, the Page access token has no expiration date.
page_url <- glue::glue("https://graph.facebook.com/{page_id}?fields=access_token&access_token={fb_user_long_lived}")

res <- httr::GET(page_url)
fb_page_never_expire <- content(res, type = "application/json")$access_token
fb_page_never_expire