Mumbai Indians, the cricket team owned by Reliance Industries leads the race on Social Media, followed by Kolkata Knight Riders and Chennai Super Kings, according to a new report.
The report, by social media benchmarking platform Unmetric, analysed social data for the month of December 2012 and January 2013 and came up with an “unmetric” score for the teams playing the Indian Premier League this season.
According to the report, the eight IPL teams have captured a total of 8.5m fans on Facebook, yet the top three teams command more than 72% of the total fans.
The Mumbai Indians attracted almost 3 million fans, while the Knight Riders and Super Kings have 1.6m fans each, which is 600,000 more than forth placed Royal Challengers. Being such a new team, the Sunrisers have still only managed to attract 3,000 fans, perhaps due to a lack of promotion or awareness of their official Facebook page, the report said.
Other findings
- Kings XI Punjab is the most surprising, recording a 519% growth rate (230,000 new fans), despite being in the IPL since its inception. It’s unclear exactly how the team went from 45,000 fans to 250,000 fans in just 3 days, however the team was running their ‘Awwal fan’ contest at the time.
- Sunrisers Hyderabad saw a growth rate of 384%, but in terms of actual numbers, only added 1,500 new fans.
- Mumbai Indians were the slowest growing team at just 1.6%, but with so many fans, one would expect them to have a lower growth rate.
- Kolkata Knight Riders posted a 15% fan growth, which was enough to take them from the third to second most popular team in the IPL ahead of Chennai Super Kings.
- Sunrisers Hyderabad stands head and shoulders above the rest with an Engagement Score of 560. This is followed by the Mumbai Indians, which scored 100 and Chennai Super Kings which scored 74. Rajasthan Royals finished at the bottom of the table with an Engagement Score of 23. The average Engagement Score for all the teams was 74.
- IPL teams respond to less than 1% of fan posts on average. Chennai Super Kings don’t even allow their fans to post on their wall. The standout team is Kings XI Punjab, which replied to more than 10% of fan posts, although they took an average of 11 hours to reply to each post.
- The Kolkata Knight Riders lead on Twitter an Unmetric Score of 28, followed by Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals which scored 26 and 24 respectively.
