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The use of social media platforms by universities enables them to communicate with current and potential students. Social media platforms have become active sources of information especially in crisis situations (Lamsal and Kumar, 2021), amongst universities worldwide (Vilceanu,FitzGerald and Sadovskaya, 2019) and in other fields such as finance (Gupta and Aluvalu, 2021) . Social media has also provided a platform for the expression of opinions which can be extracted for sentiment analysis as highlighted by Mahajan and Rana, 2021; Muliawaty et al, 2019.
Technology use, especially on social media platforms, plays a big part in Saudi society, particularly among young Saudis. Stanger et al. (2017) studied the cultural pressures experienced by Saudi young people when it came to using social media and highlighted the extensive use of social media.
The dominance of social media in society was also highlighted by the Arab Youth survey. The Arab Youth survey, conducted by ASDA’A BCW (2019), involved 3,300 face-to-face interviews with Arab men and women from 15 countries in the Middle East and North Africa aged 18–24 years old. The interviews were conducted in Arabic and English. An analysis of the survey found that social media was becoming the most dominant source for news, and youth in the Arab world were concerned about the future, i.e., employment opportunities. This is highlighted by the statistics for Saudi Arabia, where in a population of 34.14 million, 25% of the population aged 15 to 24 years old are unemployed. This figure is higher than it is in neighbouring Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries such as Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates.
A popular social media platform in Saudi Arabia among the young is Twitter. Aissani and Abdullah (2018) studied the motives of Arab youth using Twitter; they received 1,000 responses to their survey. The percentage of youths surveyed aged 18–25 was 40%. 17% of the sample indicated that Twitter was easy to use, while 15% expressed that Twitter allows the free expression of opinions. 13% said it allows more opportunities for interactions with other users. The same percentage preferred the short message aspect of tweets. A lower number of respondents (11%) welcomed the fact that Twitter outperforms traditional media and preferred the ease of communication with different types of people.
With Twitter penetration in Saudi Arabia high at 66% and issues with unemployment among the young, more research is needed about what types of information universities post on their main Twitter accounts. This will allow the authors to explore the Twitter profiles of the universities and discover whether employer engagement activities are tweeted and what the most popular types of information tweeted are. Marketing departments in Saudi universities can benefit from this information to optimise their marketing strategies in terms of engagement with potential students and other stakeholders.
The aim of this study is to explore and compare the content tweeted by private and public universities' main Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia and identify whether Saudi university Twitter accounts are effective when it comes to advertising the university to potential employers and students. This will be done via content analysis. Alqahtani et al. (2020) studied private and public universities, but they explored the network aspects of universities; their study did not provide an in-depth view of the content of the tweets. More research is needed about the content of tweets and how these tweets represent universities to employers and the community.
Private universities are defined as universities that were established to facilitate the emergence of a knowledge-based economy and strengthen the skill base of a country (Ahmed, 2020). Public universities, also known as government universities, were set up by the government; they are universities that are funded by the Saudi public through the government.