IPL 2018 MI vs CSK: Chennai a winner on social media as well; #ShareACoke also a hit

With Vivo Indian Premier League underway, exchange4media has tied up with international media intelligence company Meltwater to give weekly in-depth analysis of the online traction of the matches on social media along with insights and trends.

This week, we have examined the opening match of the tournament between reigning champions Mumbai Indians (MI) and Chennai Super Kings (CSK) held on April 7. Chennai defeated arch rival Mumbai in a close contest. 

The insights:

On April 7, MI saw a far greater number of mentions compared to CSK, which has made a comeback to the league this year after serving a two-year suspension. But the MS Dhoni-led CSK had an upper hand in the social media (though by a small margin) when studied from April 1 to 9. 





Among the brands, co-presenting sponsor Coca Cola made a strategic use of the #ShareACoke hashtag which was trending among MI supporters. Other popular hashtags included #MumbaiIndians, #ChennaiSuperKings, #YellowArmy and #Thala. When it came to performances, DJ Bravo’s act was most talked about on social media.
The league’s co-presenting sponsor Reliance Jio was leading the way on the social media over the course of these nine days.



IPL saw social media mentions from around 26K on April 1 to 140-145K on April 8, summing up to more than 500K between April 1 and 9.



The league is being live telecast in six languages (Tamil, Telegu, Bengali, Kannada, English and Hindi) by Star India network. But on social media, people preferred to talk about it in English, followed by Indonesian.



Among the platforms, Twitter was widely used to discuss the league (450K mentions) followed by YouTube and Facebook.