Indian Premiere League Rules on Social Media in India

The historic win by India in the Cricket World Cup attracted an enormous amount of  social media attention. Now one week later cricket is back in action with the Indian Premiere League.

It has been 3 years since the IPL began and with the 4th edition that launched a couple of days ago, we predict a bigger and better version for the Cricket Crazy Indians. And yes, it will make its way into the social media space too.

Back in 2008, Mashable wrote about the IPL Fan Club, predicting how big the Cricket Social Network would be considering the fervor for the game in India. The Indian Premiere League did become big but not just on this particular social network. IPL made its mark on established social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and even Orkut. Here is a look at some of the remarkable feats that the IPL has achieved:

• The official IPL fan page on Facebook has 678,466 active fans.
• The Mumbai Indians (one of the IPL franchise teams), with more than a million fans, has more fans than any other team. They have even more fans than the IPL fan page.
• Cumulatively IPL and Teams (Official Fan Pages) have around 2,178,115 fans on Facebook.
• The IPL account on Twitter has 47073 followers and teams have cumulatively 101,549 followers (at the time of writing).
• Celebrities like Shahrukh Khan and Shilpa Shetty and cricketing figures like Shane Warne and Harsha Bhogle also tweet to their thousands of followers about the IPL on a daily basis.
• #IPL4 is the top trending hashtag in India since day one of the IPL.
• Orkut, even though it’s phasing out in India, has around 672,629 members in official franchise communities.
• The number of views for IPL’s Youtube channel so far is 972,25,776.
• With 99,446 subscribers, the channel is the most subscribed channel in India.

And these stats are only for the ‘official’ fan pages. The unofficial ones bring the total much, much higher!

This 51 day battle spread over 74 matches between 10 teams began on April 8th and has been trending on social networks since then. Teams like the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Mumbai Indians are campaigning via social media attracting people to participate in various competitions and promotions. The main objective is to spread awareness and sell match tickets for all the 74 matches. Brands like Indiatimes, PIX Television, and Domino’s are all capitalizing on IPL fever, running related social media campaigns.

One can just imagine how big IPL social media influence will be by the end of the season!