  As more and more people use social media to communicate their view and
perception of elections, researchers have increasingly been collecting and
analyzing data from social media platforms. Our research focuses on social
media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parlia-ment
[translation: Bundestagswahl 2013]. We constructed several social media
datasets using data from Facebook and Twitter. First, we identified the most
relevant candidates (n=2,346) and checked whether they maintained social media
accounts. The Facebook data was collected in November 2013 for the period of
January 2009 to October 2013. On Facebook we identified 1,408 Facebook walls
containing approximately 469,000 posts. Twitter data was collected between June
and December 2013 finishing with the constitution of the government. On Twitter
we identified 1,009 candidates and 76 other agents, for example, journalists.
We estimated the number of relevant tweets to exceed eight million for the
period from July 27 to September 27 alone. In this document we summarize past
research in the literature, discuss possibilities for research with our data
set, explain the data collection procedures, and provide a description of the
data and a discussion of issues for archiving and dissemination of social media
data.
