MUMBAI: Starsports.com and Vodafone India are the first broadcaster and brand advertiser to join forces with the Twitter Amplify product in India, the two companies have announced.

They aim to tap into social conversations around TV programmes, especially live sports, and the alliance is being launched to tie in with the current India-England cricket series, exchange4media reported.

Twitter Amplify enables broadcasters to send high-quality video clips directly to digital consumers engaged in conversations on Twitter around live matches and is designed to enhance their experience.

Assisted by promoted tweets, it then amplifies the reach of the video content distributed through the Twitter accounts of broadcasters or sponsors.

It also means advertisers will be able to tap into these social conversations on Twitter and provides an opportunity to enhance their multi-screen audience engagement strategy.

Commenting on the launch, Vivek Mathur, chief commercial officer at Vodafone India, said: "As a brand, we are always looking at innovative ways of driving brand engagement and conversations on social media.

"Cricket (and sports in general) is one of our identified passion points and one with which Vodafone has a huge association. We are very excited to be the pioneers in launching a new social innovation in India centred around Twitter and cricket."

Twitter launched its Amplify product in the US in May last year with initial media owner partners including BBC America, FOX, Fuse and the Weather Channel, explained social media observer Prasant Naidu, the founder of Lighthouse Insights.

He said one of the product's most important features is that it enables broadcasters to send a video to the visible part of users' feeds so they are more likely to see it and engage with it, rather than the content getting lost in the fast feeds.

And with sponsors running a paid campaign with Twitter Amplify, "it can target anyone tweeting about that topic or content at that time, or any other user who may be interested in the content," he said.

Data sourced from exchange4media, Business2Community; additional content by Warc