As a social networking and microblogging platform that allows communication with short messages, Twitter has the potential of being used by social scientists to study users, uses, and societal communication and networking online. This How-to Guide introduces practical steps on how to gather and analyze Twitter data to answer research questions of interest. The guide starts with a discussion of the value that studying Twitter brings to social scientists while noting some of the main challenges and limitations. Thereafter, the guide introduces general principles that need to be understood prior to doing Twitter research. Those principles are meant to help guide the researcher in creating a proper research design starting with formulating the research questions, moving to the stage of identifying the most effective methods for data gathering, and ending with the analysis stage to answer those questions. Readers who wish to explore the field are encouraged to apply the main guidelines presented in this guide to case studies using tools that allow the extraction and analysis of Twitter data.