Content Analysis of the Main Twitter Accounts of Saudi Universities

Abstract

With unemployment amongst graduates in Saudi Arabia, social media platforms especially Twitter play a big part in communication. However, do universities utilise Twitter enough when engaging with employers and the community? This study analyses the post content in the main Twitter accounts of 13 private universities and 20 public universities in Saudi Arabia. Automated data extraction via Twitter API was used to gather the data. From the extracted tweets, 350 tweets were selected from private university accounts and 400 tweets from public university accounts to code for content analysis. The post content from both university types was informative and there was no presence of opinions. The most popular category of content for private universities was university events whereas for public universities it was general advertisements. References to employer engagement were more present in private university tweets compared to public university tweets. The study did highlight that more material needs to be posted relating to knowledge and technology transfer.