How Twitter In India Is Betting On The Cricket World Cup

    

Two days before the official start of play at the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 (@cricketworldcup), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s twitter account sent out 15 tweets wishing luck to each individual in the 15-member Indian cricket team. Of course this was a perfectly well executed political move, it emphasized the sheer number of people who would potentially appreciate the acknowledgement of the nation’s favorite pastime. Cricket and God are equally revered in India – and it’s one of the ways Twitter plans to take on its fastest growing market in the early stages of its India game.

Twitter Inc.’s 2013 IPO filing saw the company noting that it did not view India as a “high growth market”.

Things seem to have changed in that regard, with the early February 2015 announcement that Twitter is opening its first R&D center outside the US – in the Indian city of Bangalore. To boot, Twitter India’s Market Director Rishi Jaitly has been growing his team, based out of Mumbai.

According to research firm eMarketer, India is expected to be one of Twitter’s fastest growth user markets with a 36.5% increase in users for 2015, compared to 9.1% growth in US twitter account creations.

Statistics aside, the standing joke in India says that if the nation has a population of 1.2 billion, then at least a billion are fairly ardent cricket fans.

The great Indian love for cricket was spurred during the British colonial era, when the game was seen as a way for India’s elite to embrace what they viewed as gentlemanly British values – well explained in James Astill’s ‘The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India’.

Screenshot from the Star Sports Indian TV Advertisement for upcoming the Cricket World Cup.

Cricket in fact garnered so much popularity that it started to stand as a symbol of ardent nationalism – exacerbated in recent years by popular culture, including Bollywood’s 2001 hugely popular film,Lagaan - which used a cricket match as a symbol of India versus it’s British colonizers.

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