# TikTok hashtag analysis toolset The tool helps to download posts and videos from TikTok for a given set of hashtags over a period of time. Users can create a growing database of posts for specific hashtags which can then be used for further hashtag analysis. It uses the [TikTokApi](https://github.com/davidteather/TikTok-Api) Python package to download the posts and uses [yt-dlp](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) to download the videos. [![PyPI version](https://badge.fury.io/py/tiktok-hashtag-analysis.svg)](https://badge.fury.io/py/tiktok-hashtag-analysis) ## Pre-requisites 1. Make sure you have Python 3.9 or a later version installed 2. Install the tool with pip: `pip install tiktok-hashtag-analysis` 1. or directly from the repo version: `pip install git+https://github.com/bellingcat/tiktok-hashtag-analysis` You should now be ready to start using it. ## About the tool ### Command-line arguments ``` usage: tiktok-hashtag-analysis [-h] [--file FILE] [-d] [--number NUMBER] [-p] [-t] [--output-dir OUTPUT_DIR] [--log LOG] [hashtags ...] Analyze hashtags within posts scraped from TikTok. positional arguments: hashtags List of hashtags to scrape optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit --file FILE File name containing list of hashtags to scrape -d, --download Download video files corresponding to scraped posts --number NUMBER The number of co-occurring hashtags to analyze -p, --plot Plot the most common co-occurring hashtags -t, --table Print a table of the most common co-occurring hashtags --output-dir OUTPUT_DIR Directory to save scraped data and visualizations to --log LOG File to write logs to ``` ### Structure of output data ``` $ tree ../data ../data ├── ids │ └── post_ids.json ├── london │ └── posts │ └── data.json ├── newyork │ └── posts │ └── data.json └── paris └── posts └── data.json ``` The `data` folder contains all the downloaded data as shown in the tree diagram above. - The `ids` folder contains two files `post_ids.json` and `video_ids.json` that record the ids of the downloaded posts and videos for each hashtag. - Each hashtag has a folder with two subfolders `posts` and `videos` that store posts and videos respectively. The posts are stored in the `data.json` file in the `posts` folder, and videos are stored as the `.mp4` files in the `videos` folder. ## How to use ### Post downloading Running the `tiktok-hashtag-analysis` command with the following options will scrape posts containing the hashtags `#london`, `#paris`, or `#newyork`: tiktok-hashtag-analysis london paris newyork and will produce an output similar to the following log: $ tiktok-hashtag-analysis download -t london paris newyork -p Hashtags to scrape: ['london', 'paris', 'newyork'] Scraped 963 posts containing the hashtag 'london' Scraped 961 posts containing the hashtag 'paris' Scraped 940 posts containing the hashtag 'newyork' Successfully scraped 2864 total entries - The `-t` flag allows a space-separated list of hashtags to be specified as a command line argument - The `-p` flag specifies that posts, not videos, will be downloaded ### Video downloading Running the `tiktok-hashtag-analysis download` script with the following options will scrape trending videos containing the hashtag `#london`: `tiktok-hashtag-analysis download -t london -v` - The `-t` flag allows a space-separated list of hashtags to be specified as a command line argument - The `-v` flag specifies that videos, not posts, will be downloaded Note that video downloading is a time and data rate consuming task, as a result we recommend using one hashtag at a time when using the `-v` flag to avoid complications. ## Analyzing results ### Top n hashtag occurrences The script `tiktok-hashtag-analysis frequencies` analyzes the frequencies of top occurring hashtags in a given set of posts. Assume we want to analyze the 20 most frequently occurring hashtags in the downloaded posts of the `#london` hashtag. - The results can be plotted and saved as a PNG file by executing the following command: `tiktok-hashtag-analysis frequencies --hashtag london --number 20 --plot` which will produce a figure similar to that shown below:

Top 20 most frequent common hashtags in posts containing the #london hashtag

In the above plot, the highest occurrence is the `#fyp` hashtag, which is tagged in more than half of all posts containing the `#london` hashtag. - The results can be displayed in tabular form by executing the following command: `tiktok-hashtag-analysis frequencies --hashtag london --number 20 --print` which will produce a terminal output similar to the following: ``` Rank Hashtag Occurrences Frequency 0 london 960 1.0000 1 fyp 494 0.5146 2 uk 238 0.2479 3 foryou 221 0.2302 4 foryoupage 184 0.1917 5 viral 179 0.1865 6 fypシ 84 0.0875 7 funny 56 0.0583 8 xyzbca 51 0.0531 9 british 45 0.0469 10 england 44 0.0458 11 trending 40 0.0417 12 fy 33 0.0344 13 comedy 32 0.0333 14 roadman 28 0.0292 15 4u 27 0.0281 16 usa 26 0.0271 17 tiktok 26 0.0271 18 travel 21 0.0219 19 america 20 0.0208 Total posts: 960 ``` The `Frequency` column shows the ratio of the occurrence to the total number of downloaded posts.