Last week Elon Musk announced that SpaceX would be sending a passenger on a journey to the moon and back. That passenger, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, doesn't want to go alone. "I did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself," Maezawa said. Instead he will be bringing half a dozen artists on the journey with him. Giving birth to the #dearMoon project.
What does the general public think of this audacious plan? To find out we will analyze the sentiment and volume of social media posts containing the hashtag #dearMoon. Since the day the project was announced, there have been 4,541 unique posts with the hashtag #dearMoon.
This graph shows that the number of posts was highest on the day of the announcement, peaking at a rate of about 3 posts per minute. We can see that there was immediate interest in this project with the first mentions of the #dearMoon hashtag appearing on Twitter within minutes of the announcement. The #dearMoon mission branding was tailor made for social media, with the name of the project literally being a hashtag. No doubt this contributed to such quick and high volume social chatter.
The #dearMoon announcement also caused a huge spike in mention volume for the SpaceX brand. This spike multiplied that brands normal chatter volume by a factor of ten for two days before returning back to normal. SpaceX often has these big PR events, and they are always correlated with a huge spike in social media buzz, a great indicator that the PR event is having its intended effect.
This graph shows that the number of posts was highest on the day of the announcement, peaking at a rate of about 3 posts per minute. We can see that there was immediate interest in this project with the first mentions of the #dearMoon hashtag appearing on Twitter within minutes of the announcement. The #dearMoon mission branding was tailor made for social media, with the name of the project literally being a hashtag. No doubt this contributed to such quick and high volume social chatter.
The #dearMoon announcement also caused a huge spike in mention volume for the SpaceX brand. This spike multiplied that brands normal chatter volume by a factor of ten for two days before returning back to normal. SpaceX often has these big PR events, and they are always correlated with a huge spike in social media buzz, a great indicator that the PR event is having its intended effect.
In conclusion social media users are enthusiastic about the #dearMoon project. The #dearMoon hashtag was picked up right away on social media resulting in a strong surge of post volume. Mentions of #dearMoon had mostly positive sentiment with users focusing on the inspirational nature of the mission. Negative posts were more focused on Elon Musk than the #dearMoon project itself. In addition, this announcement has resulted in a positive boost to SpaceX brand image.
