IPL Social Media Listening Insights 2021: The Changing Social Conversations

Understand the emotions and social conversations of netizens with IPL social media listening for 2021.

We have come up with the Indian Premier League (IPL) Leaderboard based on social media mentions which gives a sneak peek of how well the game is performing. With the 8 participating teams constantly engaging with their fanbase on the internet, the overall social coverage in India and across the world is only increasing.

Using our social intelligence software Radarr, we took a deep dive into:

Netizens’ general reaction towards IPL on social media
Teams that were most frequently discussed on social media in India
Netizens’ sentiment towards the different IPL teams

Before we go into the IPL social media listening insights – let’s do a little flashback on the track record from past years by looking at the winners from 2008 to 2020. Can we find a pattern and predict this year’s IPL winner?

The Indian Premier League so far

Image: IPL match winners from 2008 – 2020

Over 1.9 million data points across various platforms on the digital landscape were available. The platforms include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, news sources, blogs, and discussion forums. This resulted in an average of 257,000 posts per day between 9 to 26 April from netizens, players, and the teams – which is more than enough data points for brands to leverage to derive insights and inspiration.

While every team is trying its best to keep their fans engaged, Chennai Super Kings (CSK) seems to have received the highest total engagement so far with 12.1 million, followed by Mumbai Indians (MI) with 5.4 million, and Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) with 3.6 million from their owned assets. CSK fans are very active when it comes to social media, the team’s key stars like Dhoni also add up to the social media mentions around CSK. Their brand engagement is pretty high mainly due to the fan following.

The table below shows the key social media metrics for owned asset posts by the teams between April 9 -26:

Updated as of April 26 2021

Here’s a graphic that shows how IPL volume of conversation has developed in India since the beginning of the league:

Here is the link to the Visualization Dashboard

CSK has received the most positive mentions (32%) while KKR has received the most negative mentions (13%) amongst the teams so far.

Digging deeper, we found that the sentiments are closely associated with the performance of teams in the specific match.

The share of voice from organic mentions, shows CSK topping the list, followed by RCB from April 9 -April 26.

Simply put, there’s a lot that goes on during the cricket league. Understanding how netizens are interacting with IPL and the news coverage around it can help brands tap into limitless opportunities!

While we’ll be keeping a tab on the changing trends during the entire season, here are some highlights from the social media discussion this week:

Sanju Samson’s flying catch to dismiss Shikhar Dhawan during RR Vs DC match gained very good mentions both from social and news
Sakariya’s catch during RR Vs PBKS match is the second most spoken about topic online
Ben Stokes sitting of the IPL due to a broken finger
Shams Mulani as a short-term COVID-19 replacement for Axar Patel

What are netizens saying about every team? Check team-wise social listening dashboard.