This report aggregates the results from Work Package 2 (WP2) and Work Package 3 (WP3) of the BELSPO funded, KBR coordinated BESOCIAL project. The aim of WP2 was to develop a strategy before the start of the real pilot in the third work package. It’s the preparation phase before the start of WP3. Here, among other things, several tools and their functionalities were tested. What is possible, what is feasible, what are the needs of researchers when using a social media archive to conduct their research, what works for this project and what does not, how we will select the hashtags and accounts etc. All this with a view to the main pilot. The aim of WP3 was to develop a social media harvester and harvest the entire seedlist created in WP2. After this, the quality of the data content was checked. A preservation plan was also drawn up for archiving social media data in Belgium. In this report, the two work packages are combined to build a bridge between the preparation and execution phases. This is in order to anticipate and prevent potential problems. The preparatory phase within BESOCIAL takes on an equally important role as execution.