Airbnb is dominating social media discussions, according to a language analysis by Crimson Hexagon on how social media indicates travel trends in the sharing economy.
The image above highlights the chatter volume when related to Airbnb. The analysis then looked at social media mentions that included all aspects of Airbnb, from its service to its business model.
Surprisingly, there is just as much chatter about the business model piece than the service as a whole itself. The wordmap below highlights words used by Airbnb users/customers between March 1 and May 3 2015, showing some intriguing words used alongside the Airbnb mention.
Out of the 66,000 tweets analyzed by the service, the sentiment comes out mostly positive: 26% have a positive sentiment and 7% being negative. Those with neutral sentiments formed the lion's share of the results, at 67%. The topics discussed, in proportion, are as follows:
Note how Ryan Mason, CEO of RentTheDress.com has performed — he is an avid tweeter and often discusses the implications of the sharing economy on Twitter. Known tastemakers do have an outsized impact when it comes to thought leadership and changing hearts and minds.
The analysis also included a look at the related affinities of those claiming to be Airbnb customers.
In general, this cohort appears to be 26x more interested in airplanes and 25x more interested in vacations than Twitter at large. In addition, this group is 514x more likely to be interested in hostels and 142x more inclined to be into business travel. This signals that the Airbnb audience is broad and not just popular with a specific subset of cash-sensitive Millennials.
The affinities play out on the following scale:
For a further breakdown on influencers in travel and social media, read here.