如何通过rtweet批量获取多个Twitter用户的粉丝列表？

Great question! I’ve run into this exact scenario with rtweet before—while get_followers() only accepts one user per direct call, there are straightforward ways to batch process your 155 accounts. Let’s walk through the best approaches:

1. Basic For Loop Approach #

The simplest way is to iterate over your list of users with a for loop, fetching followers one at a time and storing the results. This is easy to read and debug:

# Load the rtweet package
library(rtweet)

# Replace this with your actual list of 155 user screen names/IDs
target_users <- c("user1", "user2", "user3", ...)

# Initialize an empty list to store results for each user
follower_results <- list()

# Loop through each user
for (i in seq_along(target_users)) {
  current_user <- target_users[i]
  cat("Fetching followers for", current_user, "...\n")
  
  # Fetch followers, use retryonratelimit to handle API limits automatically
  user_followers <- get_followers(
    user = current_user,
    retryonratelimit = TRUE
  )
  
  # Add a column to track which user these followers belong to
  user_followers$source_user <- current_user
  
  # Store the result in our list
  follower_results[[i]] <- user_followers
}

# Combine all results into a single data frame
all_followers <- do.call(rbind, follower_results)

2. Tidyverse-Friendly purrr Approach #

If you prefer a more concise, functional programming style, use purrr::map_dfr to automatically bind results into a single data frame:

library(rtweet)
library(purrr)
library(dplyr)

target_users <- c("user1", "user2", ...)

# Use map_dfr to iterate and bind results
all_followers <- map_dfr(target_users, function(user) {
  cat("Processing", user, "\n")
  get_followers(user, retryonratelimit = TRUE) %>%
    mutate(source_user = user) # Add source user identifier
})

Critical Tips for Success #

• Rate Limit Handling: Twitter’s API restricts follower requests to 15 calls per 15-minute window. The retryonratelimit = TRUE argument is non-negotiable here—it makes rtweet automatically pause and resume when you hit limits, instead of throwing errors.
• Error Resilience: Some users might be private, suspended, or have zero followers. Wrap the get_followers call in tryCatch to avoid breaking your entire batch:

  # Example with error handling in a loop
  for (i in seq_along(target_users)) {
    current_user <- target_users[i]
    cat("Fetching followers for", current_user, "...\n")
    
    tryCatch({
      user_followers <- get_followers(current_user, retryonratelimit = TRUE)
      user_followers$source_user <- current_user
      follower_results[[i]] <- user_followers
    }, error = function(e) {
      cat("Failed to fetch followers for", current_user, ":", e$message, "\n")
      follower_results[[i]] <- NULL # Mark failed entries
    })
  }
  

• Save Intermediate Progress: With 155 users, processing could take hours. Save your list of results periodically with saveRDS(follower_results, "follower_progress.RDS") to avoid losing work if your session crashes.

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Waqas Chaudhary