Professor Susan Halford, Director Web Science Institute, University of Southampton, gives a talk on using social social media for research. The phenomenal growth of Web-based social media data provokes great interest and activity from researchers across a range of disciplines.For most, if not all, the lure of these data is that they offer important insights into the social world: digital traces of the things that people say and do in everyday life, at scale, in real time and over time. However, in the emergent field of social media analysis the challenges of working with these data are becoming increasingly apparent.This lecture outlined the disciplinary, methodological and ethical challenges of working with social media data and explored some of the routes through which these might be addressed