Abstract
Social Media (SM) platforms, particularly Twitter, have become useful tools for startup companies (henceforth startups) which use the latter to support most of their business activities. As a result, there is a need to gauge the performance of specific business initiatives vis-à-vis public sentiment, or more specifically the spread of such initiatives based on Twitter user-generated content. Previous research which makes use of Twitter analysis to analyze the business activities of startups is minimal, especially for Twitter user content in the Arabic language. Consequently, this paper proposes an analytics-based framework called Startup Initiatives Response Analysis (SIRA) designed to assess the performance of initiatives launched by startups via text classification, sentiment analysis, and statistical analysis techniques. To provide empirical evidence for the viability of the proposed research framework, this paper examined the case of an Arab transportation network startup, carrying out a SIRA analysis of an initiative undertaken by Careem to empower women by encouraging them to work for the company. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework for statistically measuring the initiative spread and the public feedback based on the user-generated content on the Twitter social platform.