Using the Twitter platform in Saudi Arabia
(An analytical study of the most popular topics)
Abstract
The Saudis occupy a wide and huge virtual space on the Twitter platform, as it is the most popular platform in the country, and the number of users in it has reached 75% of Saudis. The current study seeks to explore and analyse the reality of Saudis using the Twitter platform by looking at the most frequently used topics. For this purpose, the analytical descriptive approach and the media survey approach of the social networking platform "Twitter" were used. The study also relied on the framing theory, which is appropriate in its concept and dimensions to the context of the research topic. The most prominent topics on Twitter were extracted by taking advantage of the search features in the two artificial intelligence tools (Meltwater & NodeXL) during the time period (04/24 - 07/24/2022). Findings revealed that the most influential users, based on the number of their followers on the Twitter platform with various topics during the study period, are the preacher Dr. Ayed Al-Qarni with 1,231 tweets as the top of the list, then the journalist Ahmed Al-Shugairi with one tweet, then Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal with 49 tweets. The city of Riyadh came at the forefront of the most active cities in the total topics related to the Kingdom on Twitter during the study period, followed by the city of Jeddah. The results of measuring the the tone (positive, neutral, negative) for all interactions showed that the percentage of tweets classified as (neutral) out of all tweets amounted to (64.10%), while the tweets classified on the basis of (unclassified) recorded a rate of (12.79), then the negative tone by (12.79). (12.27%) and finally the positive tone (10.84%). As for the most frequently discussed topics, it was noted that national topics constituted 50% of the total topics, followed by social topics with a rate of 37.5%, and finally sports topics with one topic at a rate of 12.5%. The study recommends focusing on customer service, and providing the necessary link between tweets, service sites and applications, to answer inquiries about various issues. The study also recommends conducting longitudinal research over a period of 5 to 10 years to measure the extent of change in the trends of Saudi public opinion, which can be used in analysing Saudi sentiments and tendencies, and researchers can also use it as a reference study.
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