Early in the 2019 one-day international World Cup, Ben Stokes took a stupendous outfield catch against South Africa at the Oval. The resulting clip on the International Cricket Council’s Twitter account has fetched more than 1 million views.
Yet in Australia during this Twenty20 tournament, no such moments have been posted to the same social media platform at all: not Virat Kohli’s sixes to beat Pakistan, not Josh Little’s hat-trick for Ireland, not even Suryakumar Yadav’s more otherworldly shots.
Instead, they have all been posted to either Instagram or Facebook, as part of a deal the ICC signed with Meta prior to the 2021 T20 World Cup in the UAE. That’s because in terms of video engagement, but also the sizes of audiences for those two platforms in south Asia in particular, there is simply no comparison with Twitter.
Ahead of the semi-finals, the ICC’s social media team had posted 32 videos to either Instagram or Facebook that reeled in more than 10 million views each. The top-ranked clip? A Rohit Sharma highlights reel watched more than 42 million times.
While many of the Twitter conversations around the cup could well have benefited from clips and packages similar to that for Stokes’ moment at the Oval, the ICC’s head of digital, Finn Bradshaw, said there was a clear line between the governing body’s growth goals for the game, and the decision to push videos elsewhere.
“When we put up a video it’s got to answer a couple of things,” Bradshaw told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. “One, is it growing the game, and that is reaching more fans, more countries and new demographics like every sport where we’re trying to make sure we’re still relevant to a younger audience. Another part of the ICC’s remit is to generate revenue on behalf of the members and distribute it.
“Social media is a really important tool for reaching a younger audience in particular. So the numbers we really care about are the demographics we’re reaching, what are their ages, where are they, things like that. And then how often are they engaging.
“When you’re looking at platforms who do really well for you on that, Instagram and Facebook are far and away the best: Facebook has got around 3 billion users across the world, Twitter’s about 270 million or something like that. It tends not to be as strong in the subcontinent as Facebook and Instagram.”
Each day of the tournament, the team is publishing somewhere in the region of 50 to 60 videos. The viewership of these videos had already passed the equivalent mark for last year’s event in total before the final round of group games had begun. Bradshaw oversaw a similar period of growth when he headed up a major digital project for Cricket Australia between 2013 and 2019.
“We do think a lot of that growth is driven out of going to the platforms where people are, and working close with those platforms,” Bradshaw said. “We’re not just throwing things out there and hoping it works.
“On most of our platforms, India makes up about 50-60 per cent of our audience.” – Finn Bradshaw.Credit:AP
“When you’re both invested in the outcome you tend to get a multiplier effect. Whereas for a long time, sports organisations kind of just put stuff on the platforms without being able to get the feedback from those platforms on what works better, how do we do it and so on.
“Last year’s World Cup was a good start but it moved at quite late notice, teams were still in bubbles, the teams were really burned out from those bubbles, whereas this year feels like the first one where you have so much more face-to-face contact. This is the one to take all our data from as the best reflection of a World Cup.”
One way that cricket’s social media universe diverges from that of many other sports is the fact that TikTok is banned from use in India. That is one of many considerations for Bradshaw and the ICC when the deal with Meta expires next year.
“On most of our platforms, India makes up about 50-60 per cent of our audience, and so it makes sense that we lean in a lot harder on the platforms that are both available and popular in India,” he said.
“But we are also constantly trying to work on trying to reach those audiences in Germany or the USA, growth markets. Germany has been one of our best-performing countries for ICC TV, our streaming platform, so there’s a consideration around let’s make sure Facebook and Instagram are also doing the social media job for us in the US or Germany, because we want to keep growing the game.”
Whether the ICC’s videos return to Twitter is an open question at a time when the platform is being remodelled in the image of its new owner, Elon Musk. But the experience of the past few weeks has underlined to Bradshaw that the field is only broadening, for cricket as well as social media.
“We’re always talking to others, whether it’s Snap or TikTok to understand what they’re doing,” Bradshaw said. “Twitter is obviously undergoing some fairly significant changes and we’ll be reviewing all that over the next couple of months.
“We always want to hit this sweet spot of something commercially right, but also is going to push the game forward. The Meta partnership does tick all those boxes, so we hope we can continue to have those.”
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