How to build a Twitter dashboard in Google Data Studio using IFTTT

A while back I wrote a post about how to build a Twitter dashboard in Google Data Studio. Unfortunately it seems that that version no longer works, or if it does work is very buggy. But I have discovered a new way of getting tweets into Data Studio so figured I’d write a new post about how to do it.

Step 1: Create an account with IFTTT

To do this the first step is to create a new account with IFTTT. You can also sign in with Google or Facebook.

Next, you should find the option to ‘Save tweets featuring specific content to a spreadsheet‘.

 find the option to 'Save tweets featuring specific content to a spreadsheet'.

Step 2: Select a Word or Hashtag you want to collect

To stay topical, I’m going to search for tweets featuring the hashtag #CoronaVirusSA. This is used to tweet about the COVID-19 / Coronavirus pandemic cases in South Africa.

IFTTT new tweet from search

Step 3: Select what Google Sheet the Tweets are added to

You can add it to an existing sheet, or create a new one. In this example I’m creating a new one entitled ‘IFTTT – #CoronaVirusSA’.

Add row to spreadsheet in google sheets to display #CoronaVirusSA tweets

Once we’ve done that, the tweets should start appearing in Google Sheets.

Step 4: Confirm that the Tweets are appearing in Google Sheets

Next, open up Google Sheets and the new spreadsheet should be there. We can open it up and if all is working correctly, and it is a popular term, tweets featuring the term will appear. Below we can see some tweets with the hashtag #CoronaVirusSA in them.

#CoronaVirusSA tweets in a Google Sheet

Step 5: Add this sheet as a data source in Google Data Studio

We can create our report and add Google Sheets as our Data Source.

Google Sheets

We select our sheet. Notice that the names of the fields are the first tweet that has appeared in the sheet.

Data source in google data studio

We can simple rename these fields so they make sense in our Data Studio report.

Twitter dashboard data source in Data source in google data studio

Step 6: Build your report in Google Data Studio

Once we’ve added our data source we can build our report. I’ve created a simple report which you can see below.

My Other Blog Posts

I hope you found this post about how to build a Twitter dashboard in Google Data Studio interesting and useful. You might enjoy some of my previous blog posts.