BackIPL 8: Twitter to engage cricket fans both online and offline
Offline users can give a missed call to a given number to receive tweets from the official IPL Twitter handle and other featured handles as text messages
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Mumbai: Microblogging site Twitter will serve live match updates of the latest edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) that starts on 8 April through an agreement with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which conducts the popular tournament.
Live match updates, contests, and chats with cricketers and experts have been conducted over the last few instalments of the league to engage viewers and Twitter users.
This year, Twitter aims to engage cricket enthusiasts both online and offline, according to Rishi Jaitly, market director at Twitter India.
Those who are offline will need to make a missed call on a given number; they will then receive tweets from the official IPL Twitter handle and other featured handles as text messages on their phones.
“You just leave a missed call and you start following someone’s account without being on Twitter yourself," said Jaitly.
For those with an account, Twitter will deliver live broadcasts and commentary by former players, experts and popular celebrities through its mobile application Periscope.
The Periscope app allows users to track live video broadcasts by anyone they follow on Twitter. While the app is only available for Apple iOS devices at present, Twitter hopes to roll it out for Android phone users shortly, said Jaitly.
The site will also allow users to use so-called hashflags while tweeting in support of their favourite teams. This feature would allow users to get the flag logos of their favourite IPL teams on their tweets to demonstrate their support.
Twitter also worked with the recently concluded Cricket World Cup 2015 organized by the International Cricket Council. According to Jaitly, Twitter saw 1.4 billion impressions during the tournament. Impressions are a metric used to calculate the number of times a tweet has been interacted with by other users on Twitter.
BCCI is, meanwhile, planning to organize fan parks in 16 locations across India, said Sundar Raman, chief operating officer of IPL. Fans would be able to watch IPL matches at these parks live on weekends. These locations would be typically places which do not have the infrastructure to host a cricket match, said Raman.
San Francisco-based Twitter, which recently acquired Bengaluru-based technology start-up ZipDial, is currently on a drive to push more local content in India. Jaitly says that the aim is to reach out to Twitter users in local languages rather than just English. India is one of largest and fast-growing markets for Twitter alongside South American countries like Brazil.
“Our aim is to reach out to every single person in this country. We are doing a lot of local campaigns and have tied up with a whole lot of brands and companies here," said Twitter India’s business head Taranjeet Singh.
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