  This chapter discusses important challenges of designing the data collection
setup for social media studies. It outlines how it is necessary to carefully
think about which data to collect and to use, and to recognize the effects that
a specific data collection approach may have on the types of analyses that can
be carried out and the results that can be expected in a study. We will
highlight important questions one should ask before setting up a data
collection framework and relate them to the different options for accessing
social media data. The chapter will mainly be illustrated with examples from
studying Twitter and Facebook. A case study studying political communication
around the 2013 elections in Germany should serve as a practical application
scenario. In this case study we constructed several social media datasets based
on different collection approaches, using data from Facebook and Twitter.
