Premium enrichments

Profile Geo

Introduction

Millions of users provide information in their social networking profiles about where they live. The Profile Geo Enrichment significantly increases the amount of geodata in the Twitter Firehose by geocoding and normalizing users’ profile locations where possible and including the latitude/longitude coordinates and related place metadata in the Tweet payload. This data is available in the enriched native format and can be filtered with a combination of PowerTrack rules.

Note: Some of the supporting geodata used to create the Profile Geo enrichment comes from GeoNames.org and is used by Twitter under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Profile Geo data will be included in Twitter's PowerTrack, Replay, Volume Stream, Search, and Historical PowerTrack APIs.

Profile Geo Data

The Historical PowerTrack, Search, and PowerTrack APIs supports filtering based on Profile Geo data. See the appropriate product documentation for more details on what operators are available for filtering on Profile Geo data.

Sample Payload

{
    "user": {
        "derived": {
            "locations": [
                {
                    "country": "United States",
                    "country_code": "US",
                    "locality": "Birmingham",
                    "region": "Alabama",
                    "sub_region": "Jefferson County",
                    "full_name": "Birmingham, Alabama, United States",
                    "geo": {
                        "coordinates": [
                            -86.80249,
                            33.52066
                        ],
                        "type": "point"
                    }
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}

Limitations

• The Profile Geo enrichment attempts to determine the best choice for the geographic place described in the profile location string. The result may not be accurate in all cases due to factors such as multiple places with similar names or ambiguous names.
• If a value is not provided in a user’s profile location field (actor.location), we will not attempt to make a classification.
• Precision Level: If a Profile Geo Enrichment can only be determined with confidence at the country or region level, lower-level geographies such as subRegion and locality will be omitted from the payload.
• The Profile Geo enrichment provides lat/long coordinates (a single point) that corresponds to the Precision Level of the enrichment’s results. These coordinates represent the geographic center of the enrichment location results. For example, if the Precision Level is at the Country level, then those coordinates are set to the geographic center of that Country.
• The PowerTrack operators provided for address properties (locality/region/country/country code) are intentionally granular to allow for many rule combinations. When attempting to target a specific location that shares a name with another location, consider combining address rules. For instance, the following would avoid matches for “San Francisco, Philippines”: profile_locality:”San Francisco” profile_region:California When building rules that target individual Profile Geo fields, keep in mind that each increased level of granularity will limit the results you see. In some cases when attempting to look at data from a city, you may wish to only rely on a region rule where the region offers significant overlap with the city, e.g. the city of Zurich, Switzerland can be effectively targeted along with surrounding areas with profile_region:”Zurich”.
• Use with Native Geo Tweets: The Profile Geo enrichment provides an alternative type of geography for a Tweet, different from the native geo value in the payload. These two types of geography can be combined together to capture all of the possible tweets related to a given area (based on available geodata), though they are not conceptually equivalent.