Get All Follower IDs in Twitter by Tweepy

Use the rate limiting arguments when making the connection. The api will self control within the rate limit.

The sleep pause is not bad, I use that to simulate a human and to spread out activity over a time frame with the api rate limiting as a final control.

api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True, wait_on_rate_limit_notify=True, compression=True)

also add try/except to capture and control errors.

example code https://github.com/aspiringguru/twitterDataAnalyse/blob/master/sample_rate_limit_w_cursor.py

I put my keys in an external file to make management easier.

https://github.com/aspiringguru/twitterDataAnalyse/blob/master/keys.py

In order to avoid rate limit, you can/should wait before the next follower page request. Looks hacky, but works:

import time
import tweepy

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(..., ...)
auth.set_access_token(..., ...)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

ids = []
for page in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers_ids, screen_name="McDonalds").pages():
    ids.extend(page)
    time.sleep(60)

print len(ids)

Hope that helps.