Cricket to India is what football is to England. Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company for brands, undertook a study to understand how the IPL teams were performing on social media. The IPL teams have been competing not only on-field but on-line as well. The research studied engagement and content strategies of these teams on various social media touch points to derive insights about what was working for them and what wasn’t.
Here are some key highlights from the report, combined with our deeper look into the campaigns that these brands seeded on various channels:
On Facebook
The eight IPL teams captured a total of 8.5m fans on Facebook. The Mumbai Indians, The Kolkata Knight Riders and Chennai Super Kings together comprised of more than 72% of the total fans. The Mumbai Indians attracted almost 3 million fans, while the Knight Riders and Super Kings had 1.6m fans each. Kings XI Punjab grew from 45,000 fans to 250,000 fans in just 3 days when the team was running their ‘Awwal fan‘ contest. The new IPL team, Sunrisers Hyderabad, saw a slow fan growth rate and managed to add 3,000 fans during the period of the study.
While these were fan growth analyses, Unmetric cracked an ‘engagement code’ basis the number of likes, comments, shares and estimated impressions that each post received. Interestingly, Sunrisers Hyderabad stood ahead of all with an ‘engagement score’ of 560. The engagement is a direct result of the kind of content being shared by the team. The content is not just not informative but also engaging. Find an example in the snapshot below.
A deep dive into content strategies for each revealed the following points:
- The teams concentrated on asking questions related to the team and providing news about the players both during season and off season
- ‘Offers’ related content did not resonate with fans and received lowest engagement
- During the off-season, content related to merchandise received a much higher engagement than when the matches were actually happening
- News of Sachin Tendulkar’s retirement from ODIs turned out to be the most engaging topic for all teams
- Overall, game results during the match season is a definitive way to increase fan engagement and reach more people
This is what the report stated about the engagement strategies of the teams:
- The study exposed that most of these IPL teams did not engage with fans very well. They were responding to less than 1% of fan posts on average.
- Chennai Super Kings did not allow their fans to post on their wall
- Only Kings XI Punjab replied to more than 10% of fan posts, although they took an average of 11 hours to reply to each post. Here is an example of how Kolkata Knight Riders shares an update without engaging with fans.
On Twitter
The report suggested that there was little to differentiate among the Twitter strategies for each of the teams. Kolkata Knight Riders stood tall with 140,000 followers. This could possibly be attributed to the power of influence of Shah Rukh Khan. Sunrisers Hyderabad saw 142% growth of follower on Twitter, which is more than other teams. This could be the result of being a new entrant to the league.
While brands are looking at Twitter as a customer service platform, the IPL teams considered it more as a publishing platform. However, the Kings XI Punjab team was fairly good with their response time, they replied within an average of 50 minutes.
On YouTube
Royal Challengers had 3.8m views on 268 videos, which was over 1.6m more than all the other teams’ video views put together. Rajasthan Royals was second with 1.1m views, they uploaded more than twice the number of videos than any other team. Kolkata Knight Riders were third with 485,000 views. In terms of pure growth, Sunrisers Hyderabad displayed surprising results with 194% growth rate.
A more elaborate Unmetric infographic of these statistics can be found here.
“With the IPL captivating such a huge percentage of the population every year, it’s interesting that just 0.5% of the population has chosen to become a fan of one of the teams on Facebook.” - Lakshmanan Narayan, CEO, Unmetric
Please note: Unmetric compiled its IPL Report by sourcing data from its own social media benchmarking platform. Data and insights on brands’ activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest were analysed for the period between 1st December, 2012 to 31st December, 2013.
What are the learnings in this for marketers?
- A large fan following may not necessarily mean good engagement. As can be seen in the case of Kolkata Knight Riders.
- Content should be leveraged according to best times of the year for brands. For example, content during matches are focused on players and game results while content off-season focuses on contests like ‘Awwal fan’ or asides like merchandise.
- On-ground performance may or may not be linked to performance online. For example, Kings XI Punjab displayed steady engagement on both Facebook and Twitter. Sunrisers Hyderabad, yet to begin playing, have already created buzz online. Kolkata Knight Riders are disseminating information but not engaging.
What decides the success of other sports teams on social media? Do share your thoughts.
