In this tutorial I am going to describe a straightforward way of how to make use of Twitter’s REST API v1.1. For that purpose I composed a little package (RTwitterAPI), so that requesting data just needs the API URL, the API parameters and a vector containing the OAuth parameters.
Before you can get started you have to login to your Twitter account on dev.twitter.com, create an application and generate an “Access Token” for it. So let’s jump right in and fetch IDs of 10 followers of @hrw (Human Rights Watch). The necessary code is located on GitHub as a package named RTwitterAPI which may be installed using devtools::install_github().