Wasim Ahmed’s blog is a useful overview of (and links to) the various approaches and tools for analyzing social media data – with notes also on some ethics issushe notes that twitter is most used by academics, though not the most commonly used social media site: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/05/08/using-twitter-as-a-data-source-an-overview-of-social-media-research-tools-updated-for-2017/?platform=hootsuite