Comment by matt-attack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt-attack | Hacker News Reader

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That is such an overestimation of the reach and influence of the Twitter platform. People buy Teslas because they're awesome cars. People find out about Tesla because everyone and their brother has one. It started slow, you knew a guy who knew a guy, but they preached its praises. It slowly snowballed. They're to the point now, where you can't not find out about them. Twitter IMHO played a deminimus role in that. Normal people in the normal world aren't obsessing over Elon's tweets, or even reading about them.

Literally no one I know with Teslas (and it's many many) even using Twitter.

Furthermore, there are many other high-profile companies that are extremely well known that simply opt not to advertise. Look at Costco. There's no Twitter mouthpiece and no advertising yet everyone either shops there or knows about it, but doesn't shop there.

This may be true in the USA, but not in the rest of the world. I live in Europe and, even if I often drive by a Tesla dealer on my way to work, don't know that many people driving one. Basically all the discourse I hear about Tesla comes from the Internet (and most of it from Twitter, even if I don't actually use that site).

The next time I have to buy a car, my decision to buy or not a Tesla will be heavily influenced by the information I already have, which comes from there (obviously, I'll also take other things into account and even pay a visit to the dealer - but still, I wouldn't consider it if nobody told me anything about the brand).

Absolutely, completely wrong. All of what your wrote. Musk's Twitter has given Tesla hundreds of billions of advertising equivalent exposure.

Yikes, if that equivalence is true then Twitter advertising has a horrible ROI. Less than $1 of sales per dollar of advertising is not a good look.

Hundreds of billions.

I could believe, maybe, 'millions'. A hundred thousand dollars buys you a lot of ads on twitter.

Whoosh. Musk's tweets gets him into newspapers and magazines globally. Thousands of them. TV too. You can't buy that kind of advertising.

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