Social media is becoming a hub for most of internet users to communicate, share their thoughts, report news, and express themselves. A large amount of research started to utilize the huge amount of data from social media in many different applications. In this talk, three example fields of research with social media data are presented. Initially, the task of information retrieval is discussed, where the main objective is to retrieve the most relevant information needed from social media effectively and efficiently. Secondly, data mining applications from social media are presented and demoed for applications such as text classification and sentiment analysis. Thirdly, using social media for computational social science studies is presented with some focus on political issues. A few examples are presented, including: studying the antecedent of ISIS support on social media, public response towards Muslims after Paris attacks 2016, and finally, the nature and dynamics of social media during the US Presidential Election 2016. Most of the work in this presentation was featured in news articles in popular press, such as CNN, Washington Post, BBC, the Independent, Aljazeera, the Daily Mail, and Mirror.