Park, Young-Eun, Mamdouh Alenezi
The importance of Multi-National Enterprises (MNEs) located in the Middle East and North Africa is increasing. Especially, the role of Saudi Arabia’s MNEs has been increased as global leaders in line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan. However, the existing literatures focus mainly on informative issues, those do not fully capture the opportunities with checking up on consumers reactions or perception over those firms. Accordingly, in this study, we explored consumers’ reactions through social media, such as Facebook and Twitter to predict future popularity and trends of firms. This was done by analysing the pattern on consumers' preference for Saudi Arabia’s four leading, multinational companies via data mining technique, sentiment analysis. The result shows that social media would be a powerful and valuable tool to forecast future popularity of multinational enterprises. Moreover, this study has a significant implication practically for business decision-making using social media to expand business globally.