Twitter is testing a dedicated cricket tab on its Android app for select users in India starting this week, the company said on March 29, looking to capitalise on the ongoing domestic cash-rich Indian Premier League (IPL) tournament.
The tab, which will be available through the app's discovery-focused Explore tab, would be a single landing point that will help cricket enthusiasts discover relevant, exclusive, and Twitter-first content, the company said.
"Through our new cricket experiment offering an immersive experience, we want to make it easier for India’s cricket fans to find relevant and engaging content as well as encourage conversations and find latest updates including the score all in one place" said Shirish Andhare, Director of Product for Twitter India.
The micro-blogging site said that about 4.4 million Indians on Twitter shared 96.2 million Tweets about cricket between January 2021 and January 2022.
“We learn from the conversations constantly unfolding on the service and they motivate us to build more for our audiences here. Since cricket’s biggest fan bases extend way beyond their teams’ home stadiums in India, and everyone can’t be at every match, Twitter has been an incredibly important part of how the cricket storyline gets out there to fans not just in India but all over the world" Andhare said.
Playing to gallery
For users who have access to this tab, they will be able to view content in various formats including an events page that will help them follow the most recent Tweets and updates from the field on a dedicated page at the top of the cricket tab.
A live scorecard feature, which was introduced by Twitter in October 2021, will appear on the cricket tab as well as on the Events page.
Users will also get access to interactive content widgets like top players and team rankings along with latest information on what their favourite players are up to in real time during an ongoing match, the company said.
Twitter has also partnered with broadcast and creator partners such as Star Sports, Cricbuzz and commentator Boria Majumdar to provide video content, including in-match moments, highlights, and off-field action.
Other features include dedicated Twitter Lists of prominent cricket teams and players and a new IPL topic, available under the cricket tab, for fans who intend to follow conversations "a lot more closely".
Twitter also recently introduced custom IPL team emojis in English and eight Indian languages—Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.
In October 2021, the social media firm had extended its Communities feature to India with the launch of a cricket-focused community ahead of T20 World Cup.
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