The #MakeInIndia Lion has its own pride of place on Twitter

This week, Indians have something special to celebrate and be proud of — not involving cricket or Bollywood! @MakeInIndia, one of the largest economic development initiatives run by the Indian government, is the first non-US brand to use its own Twitter emoji for a worldwide audience. Launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@NarendraModi) last year, the #MakeInIndia program is one of the top government initiatives in 2015. It aims to promote India as a great place for foreign direct investment with the goal of transforming the country into a global manufacturing hub.

When you Tweet, use the #MakeInIndia hashtag and you will see an emoji of a black lion against an orange background (which is the national program’s official logo) appear next to the hashtag in your Tweet.

The launch of the #MakeInIndia Twitter emoji marks the success of a campaign that has seen nearly 500 million impressions this year, 300 million of which (and 24 million engagements) occurred in August and September alone. To date, the US, Japan, and the UK are the top three markets for the global #MakeInIndia conversation on Twitter, with a 95% neutral-to-positive sentiment, and positive Tweets 3X higher than negative. The #MakeInIndia campaign also has a higher engagement rate and lower cost per engagement than Twitter’s own benchmarks for other global campaigns.

To commemorate the global launch of the #MakeInIndia emoji, we hosted Mrs. Nirmala Sitharaman (@nsitharaman), the Indian Minister of Commerce and Industry, at our company headquarters in San Francisco, where she met with CEO Jack Dorsey, as well as senior Twitter executives including Shailesh Rao, Vice President for Asia Pacific, Latin America and Emerging Markets, and Parminder Singh, Managing Director of India, Southeast Asia and Middle East North Africa. They discussed the importance of India as a strategic growth market and how Twitter’s platform can be used to promote the country’s brand to the rest of the world (currently the world’s 7th most valuable nation brand, according to Brand Finance).

We hope to mark many more milestones with the Indian government’s visionary campaign over the next few years. Here are the top three most shared Tweets from @MakeInIndia over the past year. Follow @MakeInIndia to get regular updates on the country’s progress in this important endeavour.