How @IPL 8 smashed a six on Twitter

It was a comeback to rival some of the biggest comebacks in sport: @mipaltan win 9 out of their last 11 IPL games to be crowned champions for the second time in three years. As the excitement on the field soared, so did the public conversation around the IPL on Twitter.

There were 375.4 million views of @IPL-related Tweets during the live match windows of Season 8.

 Those impressions were driven by some top cricketing moments. No real surprises, apart from that man @sachin_rt underlining just how loved he remains even on the sidelines of the game.

Among the most mentioned players, two of the top three batsmen didn’t make it to the final. @ABdevilliers17 was the most talked about batsman on Twitter. The #PurpleCap for most mentioned bowler on Twitter goes to Ashish Nehra of @Chennaiipl. @Harbhajan_Singh who starred for @mipaltan in the final makes up the top 3.

The @IPL saw massive growth as there was a 133 % increase in @IPL followers between the end of season 7 and the end of season 8.

To give you an idea of just how widespread the conversation was during the entire season, look at this heat map.

In partnership with the @IPL, broadcasters and teams, our goal was to make the league even more accessible to Twitter users and fans during IPL 8– on-air, on the ground, online and offline.

Innovations for the IPL

One of the biggest innovations in partnership with the @IPL was to give fans who aren’t connected to the internet an easy way to stay in touch through Free Tweets on SMS from @IPL and a majority of the IPL Teams.

Of course, you could also follow all the conversation from before the start of the season right to the end with the #IPL Cricket Timeline. It had the latest scores, commentary, photos and more.

Even before the match began, @SonySix and @SonyMax, the official TV broadcasters of the IPL in India, offered Extra Innings (#eit20) to involve fans by showcasing viewer Tweets on screen.

This season, we also introduced hashflags for IPL on Twitter: You could show support for your favourite team by Tweeting with that team’s hashtag so that their flag would appear in the Tweet. No prizes for guessing that hashflags were super popular!

And further, the @IPL included Tweets into its live TV broadcasts so fans might have a shot at being featured on screen to hundreds of millions of cricket fans.

During every match, Tweets were displayed not just in the TV broadcast, but also integrated via @Fabric into the official @IPL app to ensure that you had all the colour you needed from the world of Twitter. This was made possible by @pulselive.

You could also vote for your favourite player on Twitter while watching the match in IPL’s Twitter #PlayerBattle.

And things got really Twittery: Instead of their names, @RCBtweets displayed their players’ Twitter accounts on jerseys for a match!

IPL Video on Twitter

And then there was video. For the first time in the history of the league, IPL brought six- second highlights to Vine in real time.

During the match, digital broadcaster @Hotstar made use of @SnappyTV to bring IPL highlights via Twitter Video to assure that you wouldn’t miss any key moments.

There was plenty of rich, candid content through the season. This Tweet was a special highlight from the champions @mipaltan just minutes after being crowned champions.

Through the Twitter Audience Index, we captured the results of all this engagement around the IPL. Here’s a brief rundown of how the data played out as the event progressed.

And finally, here’s a recap of some of crowd favourites from the IPL.

It has been quite the summer! We hope you had a great time following the IPL on Twitter.

Sport goes on, so catch you soon!