thankyousachin#ThankYouSachin campaign launched by BCCI earlier this month has crossed 3 million tweets according to the counter on its website. To put things in perspective, one in every six Indians on Twitter posted at least one tweet with the hashtag. BCCI launched the campaign ahead of the test series against West Indies, at the end of which Sachin Tendulkar retired from international cricket.

thankyousachin-BCCI
In a blog post today, Twitter said that this post by Sachin is now the most retweeted one of all time in India. It also said that ESPNCricinfo (@ESPNcricinfo), Yahoo Cricket (@YahooCricket), Cricbuzz (@cricbuzz), Sportskeeda (@Sportskeeda), Wisden India (@WisdenIndia), Hindustan Times (@htTweets) and DNA (@dna) participated in this campaign.

As part of the campaign Twitter users could tweet @BCCI with the hashtag and receive a reply that linked to a picture of Sachin, including a personalised message and signature in his handwriting. The service was powered by Digigraph, that works on sharing personalised, autographed, collectible digital photos.

Though 3 million tweets were posted, it is less considering there are reportedly more than 33 million Indians on Twitter. A good number of these tweets were posted during the test series when Sachin batted or bowled. Out of these tweets, a lot of them were farewell messages to the batting legend and another bunch would be responses from BCCI to people who tweeted them with the hashtag. That being the case, we do not know the exact number of digigraphs that were handed out via Twitter. Digigraph refused to tell us the exact number or how the technology works and instead pointed us to this older press release announcing the launch of the campaign.

Digigraph has in the past tied-up with Ford Racing for Formula Drift to give away autographs from the team’s drivers — Justin Pawlak and Vaughn Gittin Jr. It had also tied-up with Team Detroit to generate buzz around Ford Racing at Pure Michigan 400.

Update: Twitter ads for #ThankYouSachin campaign?

Twitter gave a gentle push for the campaign when it started an India centric blog on November 6 and now it seems to be pushing what looks like ads on to streams of Twitter users in India. It is not clear, if this is indeed an ad or if Twitter is pushing these alerts as part of a tie-up with BCCI. When we contacted Twitter to find out more about the campaign earlier this week, it pointed us to the aforementioned blog post without adding any further information on the nature of the tie-up. Here’s what the alert looks like.

bcci message sachin

How the tweets grew over the days

thankyousachin-graphThis data was compiled from the tweets of Gaurav Saxena who is Project Head Digital & New Media at BCCI.