In recent times Elon Musk made headlines for various reasons, where most of which were controversial. It is observed that Tesla also started increasing external communications. Tesla’s PR department was dissolved in 2020. Since then the automaker’s announcements went through Elon Musk. Which is rather hitting the company’s reputation when there are controversial situations with regard to Elon Musk.
Tesla has not reinstated its US or global PR team, at least not yet, but the automaker has certainly significantly increased its communications over the last few months. As Electrek pointed out, we can notice that Tesla has been increasingly tweeting about its products lately. Tesla normally would only tweet about new products or features, but over the last few months, the automaker has started to often post new threads that feature existing products and features.
When cornering, Track Mode automatically shifts power front-to-rear & side-to-side to give you better turn-in response & maximum control pic.twitter.com/7mcnY2llU1
— Tesla (@Tesla) January 19, 2023
This wasn’t usual for Tesla until a few months ago. There is also data being tracked of when Tesla is tweeting. It shows that tweeting has increased over the past few months. There is a huge difference between the number of tweets before October and after October. The increase is also becoming more frequent. Possibly the coming announcements are going to be completely from Tesla’s Twitter handle. Especially as Elon Musk has been focused on Twitter.
Other social media handles
Tesla also ramped up its use of Instagram around the same time. The automaker also regularly uses Weibo, but that has always been the case as a different team handles Chinese communications. Furthermore, Tesla also ramped up its blog posting effort. Before September, Tesla had only posted two blog posts in 2022 – one to introduce track mode in Plaid vehicles and one to defend itself against a California Department of Fair Employment and Housing lawsuit. But from September until this month, Tesla published six blog posts on its website.
The timing of this change appears to match CEO Elon Musk becoming increasingly controversial. Over the last few months, surveys have shown that Tesla’s reputation has been going down, and the stock price is crashing further than the rest of the industry. Many people have associated the trend with Musk becoming increasingly political on Twitter and alienating a big part of Tesla’s user base, namely liberals, who buy EVs at a much higher rate than conservatives. Musk was always the defacto Tesla spokesperson, but when Tesla had a global PR department, the automaker had much stronger public communications that didn’t have to always go through the CEO. Though that has been the case so far, things might be changing for Tesla.
