Celebrating the ongoing IPL season, Twitter on Tuesday announced that it is testing a dedicated Cricket tab that has started appearing on the Explore page in India. The new tab comes as a standalone place from where cricket fans will be able to catch all the latest updates about their favourite matches, teams, and players. It also features video highlights, live cricket scoreboard, and exclusive Twitter-first content. Twitter has also introduced custom IPL team emojis in English and seven Indic languages to increase its engagement among cricket lovers and give them another reason to talk about their favourite teams using the microblogging network.
Twitter is rolling out the Cricket tab as an experiment to some people in India who are using its Android app. You will get it on the Explore page with the title IPL. The tab will provide you with the most recent tweets and updates from the field on a dedicated page at the top. It will also have a live scorecard that you can also access from the Events page during live cricket matches.
The dedicated Cricket tab will also have content widgets such as top players and team rankings. Further, there will be customised video content including in-match moments, highlights, and off-field action.
Twitter has partnered with Star Sports for expert AMA sessions, franchise content, and in-studio action in five languages, namely English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. The platform will also feature panel discussions, match previews, and reviews via Cricbuzz and pre- and post-match shows and interviews from sports journalist Boria Majumdar.
In addition to videos, Twitter will feature cricket-related tweets using machine learning on the Cricket tab. Cricket lovers can also follow the IPL topic on the platform to get the latest updates from the tournament.
Cricket fans on Twitter can also follow dedicated Twitter Lists of their favourite teams and players to get subject-related tweets on a separate timeline. Twitter will also provide push notifications around key moments during matches to let you stay updated.
Additionally, Twitter has created custom team emojis in English and seven Indic languages, namely Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu to let fans tweet about their favourite teams during IPL 2022.
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This is notably not the first time when Twitter has shown interest to please cricket fans in India. During the World Cup tournament last year, Twitter launched the cricket scoreboard and community in the country. It also brought the World Cup timeline in the past to provide latest updates on a dedicated screen.
Giving some estimation on how its platform is popular amongst cricket lovers in the country, Twitter said that 75 percent of its users in India identify as cricket fans and 58 percent play the sport. The company also claimed that between January 2021 and 2022, 4.4 million users on its platform shared 96.2 million tweets about cricket.
