BY AKSHAY MATHUR
Senior Vice President, Komli Media
After Shah Rukh Khan, if there is one thing that sells in India, it’s cricket. It’s either the superstar’s stardom or the charisma of our Men in Blue that sends Indian audiences into frenzy. Currently, cricket fever has gripped the nation. The Indian Premier League or IPL is one of the biggest sporting events in India, and it’s an opportunity no marketer or brand can afford to miss.
Internationally, the FIFA World Cup, Olympic Games and Super Bowl are some of the sporting events that create incredible buzz on social media. In all this, there is no better platform than Twitter to express yourself live. In fact, social media platforms are like the living room of a house where brands and their audiences talk about the topic that they love the most - cricket. You can hear everyone’s views and share opinions. Marketers understand that social media marketing is much beyond just directly selling. On social media, brands can have a three-way conversation with prospective customers/ users around a topic of mutual interest, which is more valuable than communicating one way.
As per a Nielsen Twitter Consumer Deep Dive Survey in 2015, 95% of sports fans follow brands or companies and 59% would do so if the brand provided match updates. Whether it’s a sports or nonsports brand, it will only be able to strike a chord with an audience when it is able to build a connection with cricket and a community around it.
In the ongoing cricketing events, brands are engaging with users on social media platforms to draw their attention. For instance, mobile phone companies are running contests where they require fans to upload cricket-related selfies on Twitter... They are using the moment brilliantly to talk to their audience. Marketers strongly believe that social media is a good insight tool and hence a number of brands actively ‘listen’ to refine their strategies. Social media marketing is also cost effective as brands can reach out to and engage with twice the number of targeted cricket fans by spending half of TV sponsorship monies.
IPL has been driving discussions and debates on social media since its debut season in 2008. It has always provided a platform to passionate fans to show some love and vent out their anger through shares, likes and retweets. On the other hand, it also gives the likes of Twitter and Facebook the muchneeded engagement they are always craving. The two platforms vary in the kind of content they have to offer. While Twitter is more real-time, and is a great platform to get live updates, Facebook wins over it when it comes to all-round engagement. If last year’s statistics are to be believed, The Twitter audience index recorded a total of 290.1 million live tweet impressions over a period of five weeks (April 9 to May 13, 2015). Facebook too witnessed skyrocketing figures with more than 26 million people recording nearly 250 million interactions around IPL. Interactions, in Facebook language, could mean anything from a post (text, video, photo). India being the cricket crazy nation it is, recorded 200 million interactions by 19 million people. With an immensely huge reach, targeted marketing and an offering that doesn’t hurt the wallet while reaching twice the audience size, social media is any marketer’s paradise.
As the popularity of IPL grows, brands will continue to piggy-back on it to get noticed and talked about amongst their target audience. It’s only the brands that will play the long innings on social media stand a chance to win the hearts of the audience.
@ FEEDBACK
akshay.mathur@komli.com
