Social Media Monitoring of the Campaigns for the 2013 German Bundestag Elections on Facebook and Twitter

Due to the increase in social media communication in the context of elections, researchers have been able to collect and analyze data from social media platforms in a meaningful way. Our research focuses on social media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parliament [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. On Facebook we identified 1,408 Facebook walls containing approximately 469,000 posts. 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. The Twitter data collection period started in early July 2013. The Facebook data was collected in November 2013 for the period of January 2009 to October 2013. 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.