Python – API.followers() in Tweepy

Twitter is a popular social network where users share messages called tweets. Twitter allows us to mine the data of any user using Twitter API or Tweepy. The data will be tweets extracted from the user. The first thing to do is get the consumer key, consumer secret, access key and access secret from twitter developer available easily for each user. These keys will help the API for authentication.

API.followers()

The followers() method of the API class in Tweepy module is used to get the specified user’s followers ordered in which they were added.

Syntax : API.followers(id / user_id / screen_name)

Parameters : Only use one of the 3 options:
id : specifies the ID or the screen name of the user
user_id : specifies the ID of the user, useful to differentiate accounts when a valid user ID is also a valid screen name
screen_name : specifies the screen name of the user, useful to differentiate accounts when a valid screen name is also a user ID

Returns : a list of objects of the class User

Example 1 :The followers() method returns the 20 most recent followers.

# import the module
import tweepy

# assign the values accordingly
consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_token = ""
access_token_secret = ""

# authorization of consumer key and consumer secret
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)

# set access to user's access key and access secret
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

# calling the api
api = tweepy.API(auth)

# the screen_name of the targeted user
screen_name = "geeksforgeeks"

# printing the latest 20 followers of the user
for follower in api.followers(screen_name):
    print(follower.screen_name)

Output :

ManojChevula
davidasem_
rajneesosho
sl_jens
Sandeep06081
abdulwhabalras2
chryptografio
_Mohit_Rajput_
elamineyamani
abhiSharma0311
PawanYa87321156
yagneshmb
yogeekabhi
DarioGallardo2
imharsan
MOHAMMA18757894
ArunKum79855492
ans_human_ap
1nonlyabhi

Example 2: More than 20 followers can be accessed using the Cursor() method.

# the screen_name of the targeted user
screen_name = "geeksforgeeks"

# getting only 30 followers
for follower in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers, screen_name).items(30):
    print(follower.screen_name)

Output :

mr_manav852
MohsinI09002010
educatorly
JimXu_artist
JaiHin303
Indrajeet307
sainisajal147
aryangarg22
Ashutos11691851
ManojChevula
davidasem_
osho957
sl_jens
Sandeep06081
abdulwhabalras2
chryptografio
_Mohit_Rajput_
elamineyamani
abhiSharma0311
PawanYa87321156
yagneshmb
yogeekabhi
DarioGallardo2
imharsan
MOHAMMA18757894
ArunKum79855492
ans_human_ap
1nonlyabhi
SimplicitySol2
prateekmaj21

Example 3: Counting the number of followers.

# the screen_name of the targeted user
screen_name = "geeksforgeeks"

# getting all the followers
c = tweepy.Cursor(api.followers, screen_name)

# counting the number of followers
count = 0
for follower in c.items():
    count += 1
print(screen_name + " has " + str(count) + " followers.")

Output :

geeksforgeeks has 17338 followers.