© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. The collection, mining and analysis of social media are arguably one of the core examples of “big data” sets for the social sciences. The dynamic nature of the media makes it a new and emerging base for the analysis of human behaviour and brings new opportunities to understand groups, movements and society.Analysing the results of billions of conversations has already revolutionised marketing and advertising. However, these datasets, by their very nature, are complex, time-consuming and computationally difficult to analyse. We put in place a series of examples to utilise such datasets with a view of exploring non-complex workflows via the use of new toolkits, linking into data collection via the crowd and opening up systems for analysis.