The Impact of What Elon Musk Is Saying On Twitter

Elon Musk’s Twitter account, which has more than 48 million followers, is one of the most closely watched ones in the world. On February 20, the Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur wrote a seemingly innocuous comment on Twitter that bitcoin prices “do seem high”. 

Two days later, the price of Bitcoin dropped by more than $3,000 within 5 minutes – shortly after the opening of the US stock exchange. The decline plunged as much as 17% within 24 hours. Tesla, which had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, also saw its stock prices drop.  

This is not the first time that Elon Musk has influenced his company’s share or Bitcoin prices through his Twitter activity. Previously, after the billionaire tech titan changed his Twitter bio to #bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin rose from 32,000 U.S. dollars to nearly 38,000 U.S. dollars. 

As a celebrity entrepreneur, Elon Musk’s every move on Twitter is examined. On February 2, he posted “Off Twitter for while”, which triggered yet another round of news reports.

The number of replies to Elon Musk’s infamous tweet garnered more than 34,000 replies – much higher than the average number of replies to his tweets over the past 12 weeks.  

After Musk announced that he was taking a hiatus from Twitter on February 2, 90% of his tweets published in the past 12 weeks had less than 11,715 replies.

Naturally, this move aroused the attention of the media around the world, who followed up with news reports on what exactly was Elon Musk doing while he claimed to be “off Twitter”. 

However, this Twitter hiatus didn’t last long. Less than 48 hours later, Musk resurfaced on Twitter on February 4 with a slew of re-tweets and started posting up to 10 tweets in a day.  

Reviewing Elon Musk’s 2020 Twitter Activity 

We review Elon Musk’s Twitter activity in 2020 with Falcon.io, the unified social media and CX management platform. 

Last year, he posted 3,684 tweets. Besides ‘Tesla’, ‘Bitcoin’ became another frequently-used hashtag on Twitter. Among his tweets, 11% of them were written by him (Proactive tweets), 9% are Retweets, and a whopping 80% of them are Replies. This shows that Musk likes to interact and engage with netizens. The highest number of proactive tweets in a day was chalked up on July 15, when he posted 9 tweets, while 37 replies were recorded on July 2 – even higher than former US President Donald Trump, who is an avid Twitter user.  

How does Elon Musk’s Twitter activity compare to Tesla’s and another influential company CEO – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos?

Of Musk’s 390 proactive tweets in 2020, 28 of them were re-tweeted on Tesla’s Twitter account, which attracted a whopping number of 2,956 replies. In contrast, Bezos only produced 11 proactive tweets for the whole of 2020. 

With Falcon.io Benchmark, we can analyse the engagement rates on Twitter accounts – down to the most engaging tweet and optimum timings for Twitter engagement. Musk has 6 times more followers than Tesla on Twitter, while the average engagement rate of Musk’s Twitter posts is close to double that of Tesla’s.  

Looking at the great disparity in following between Musk’s and Telsa’s Twitter accounts, it is no surprise that Tesla is looking to beef up its customer service support for its CEO online.  According to media reports, Tesla is hiring “Customer Service Specialists” to handle a range of customer issues including addressing customers’ complaints that are directed to Elon Musk via social media. Musk regularly tweets about product updates, opinions on Tesla’s stock performance and even responds to customer’s comments on Tesla’s products. 

Although some may think that Musk spends too much time on Twitter, he thinks otherwise as most of his tweets are centred around issues that he is trying to resolve. At the same time, he also urged people to take his tweets with a pinch of salt. Those who know better would note that Musk’s tweets are no ordinary tweets.  

The charts and figures in this article are put together using Falcon Benchmark, which listens to what over 100,000 brands are saying on social media and understands how the audience is reacting to that. Clients use Benchmark to help them create better content, get more certainty around their social media strategy, and automate all their reporting.  

Contact us for more information on Falcon.io, your one-stop platform for social media communications. Companies that have worked with Falcon.io include Carlsberg, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and L’Oreal.

The original version of this article is written by Wendy Huang, Senior Communications Strategist, Global Communications at PR Newswire.