Purpose: Students face several simultaneous transitions when they decide to study abroad. These transitions are shaped by differences in academic, social, cultural, and everyday life between the home and host countries. Research suggests that social media play both positive and negative roles in this experience. Within this context, this research sets out to investigate what are Saudi students' experiences of the transitions to study in the UK and the role played by social media. To achieve this, the following research questions are posed: • What motivates Saudi students to study abroad and why do they choose the UK? • In the context of the Saudi student experience: o What types of transitions do international students go through during their experience of studying abroad? o What are the characteristics of the transitions that international students experience when studying abroad? o Do international students make a digital transition in their social media use during their transition experience and do social media play a positive or negative role in their experience? Design: This research adopted a pragmatic paradigm with a constructivist ontology and an interpretivist epistemology. A sequential multiple qualitative method-based study was conducted using two methods. In the first method, seventeen Saudi students studying or planning to study in UK higher education were interviewed and the data subjected to thematic analysis. In the second method, Twitter timelines for each participant were retrieved using the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) with content and sentiment analysis applied to the collected tweets. The first method enabled a deeper understanding of the students' perspectives regarding their transition experience and their use of social media. The second method was useful to expand and confirm the understanding of transition and see how a digital transition on Twitter can occur. Applying the two methods permitted a form of data triangulation to increase this study's quality. Credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability were also applied to assess the trustworthiness of this research. Ethical considerations for collecting, analysing and reporting interviews and social media data were respected and reported in this study. Findings: This study reported various factors related to what pushes international students to study abroad. This included the students' desire to increase their cultural awareness, to enhance their academic skills, to achieve self and academic development and to increase their employment opportunities. One factor more specific to Saudi students in particular was related to the students being pushed by their home employer. Because of the absence of some study programmes in Saudi Arabia and the higher quality of international education institutions, employers usually oblige their staff to pursue higher education abroad. As for what motivates the students to choose the host country, this study found that the positive reputation of the UK education system and the ease of application procedures were common pull factors. Saudi students choose the UK because of geographic proximity of the UK, the length of study and the lesser fear of Islamophobia. This study also found that students go through six transitions when they study abroad. These included the social, cultural, academic, language, everyday life arrangements and digital transitions. Each of these transitions can be multi-dimensional and overlapping, with the transitions affecting and being affected by each other. There can be variations in the dominant transition experienced in a specific period or for the whole period. This study identified seven characteristics of international students' transition experiences: (1) multi-dimensional consisting of multiple transitions, (2) unpredictable with a mismatch between expectations and reality, (3) more than an individual experience because significant others are involved in shaping the experience, (4) dynamic in terms of its start and length, (5) multiemotional and can be positive, negative or mixed, (6) unequal with differences in gender and cultural background affecting the experience, and (7) non-linear. These characteristics were found to be interlinked, both affecting and being affected by each other. Considered together, they can build up a picture for the international students' transition. This study, through its two methods, was able to identify changes in social media use associated with the students' physical move overseas. Therefore, a digital transition on social media was confirmed which, in this study, included changes in posted content, frequency of use, and the language of posts. Social media were found to play positive roles by enabling the students to seek necessary information and to communicate socially with new or existing others. However, it was also found to have a negative role when it isolated the student from the new society. For the students in this study, the benefits of social media outweighed the negative. Originality: This study fills a gap in the literature regarding Saudi students and their study abroad transition, reporting various empirical findings related to the students' status of being Muslims from a conservative society. This study also contributes to the literature on international students' use of social media by investigating their digital transition and how social media were used throughout their transition. This study was able to make a theoretical contribution by providing a new conceptualisation of the international student transition via presenting the types and characteristics of this transition. This not only contributes to the body of work on international students but also can be applied to other transition contexts and the transition concept as a whole. Combining data gathered from interviews with social media data in the international student transition context can be considered a methodological contribution of this study. The combination of these methods provided different angles of investigation which added more depth to the understanding of the research questions and also triangulated the data sources. Recommendations for those interacting with international students, in the home and host countries, include the provision of social, emotional, and academic support, and pre- and postarrival preparation for students. Future international students who will be potentially exposed to the social, cultural, academic, language, everyday life arrangements and digital changes, are recommended to make preparations to smooth the experience of these transitions.