BHUBANESWAR: Social media has changed the face of international sports. As fans from across the globe follow their favourite sports, players and teams - minute by minute - on the internet space, gone are the days of organising such events within the traditional framework.
For sports bodies and host nations, providing televised access and content to sports lovers through use of social media platforms and generating fan reactions is a key strategy. That massive advertising spending is diverted to social media is another good reason to ramp up the activities on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Sample this: The 2014 FIFA World Cup final between Germany and Argentina had produced a whopping 280 million interactions by 88 million people on Facebook alone. On micro-blogging site Twitter, on an average 618,000 tweets were generated every minute. Statistics reveal that the final led to a mindboggling 32.1 million tweets.
That brings focus to how Odisha, which has been hogging limelight for hosting international events like Hockey World League Final 2017 and Asian Athletics Championships (AAC), has fared on the social media. Was the Department of Sports and Youth Services (DSYS) upto the task?
Even before the final match between Rio Olympics champion Argentina and Australia, the Department’s social media activities generated 9.1 lakh impressions on Facebook and Twitter during a 10-day period between November 30 and December 9, sources in the Department said.There were at least 64,400 engagements including likes, comments, retweets and shares on the official handles of the Department. The event, in which top eight hockey-playing nations participated, reached more than 7.1 lakh people on these two platforms.
That apart, the DYSY posts were used by the media while national hockey body Hockey India and International Hockey Federation also picked up its creatives and graphics.It was during the Asian Athletics Championships 2017, the Department first created a buzz on the social media and generated significant footfalls. The two social media platforms saw over 1.2 lakh fans, over 2,000 posts and five lakh usage of the hashtags. Such was the engagement that the event generated a whopping 7 crore impressions which remains a milestone. That event, which saw over 80 lakh accounts reaching with the official hashtag #AAC2017, had trended twice nationally on Twitter.
“The bang created for these international sports events not only speaks volumes of the outreach strategy of the Department during such a short period of time but also that of Odisha Government which has taken to the social media in a big way across different sectors,” said a senior official of the Department.
