The Hero Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) has won the award for “Best Use of So­cial Me­dia” from the pres­ti­gious In­ter­na­tion­al Sports Con­ven­tion (ISC) for the league’s so­cial me­dia and con­tent strat­e­gy dur­ing 2020 at the an­nu­al In­ter­na­tion­al Sports Awards.

The tour­na­ment took place be­tween Au­gust 18 Au­gust and Sep­tem­ber 10 and as a re­sult of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic it was played be­hind closed doors. Be­cause of this, the use of so­cial me­dia to keep fans en­gaged was more im­por­tant than ever. CPL achieved great re­sults, with over one mil­lion new fol­low­ers added and over 300 mil­lion so­cial me­dia video views achieved dur­ing the tour­na­ment pe­ri­od alone.

From the point that the lock­downs start­ed ear­li­er in 2020 Hero CPL worked tire­less­ly to keep fans en­ter­tained. From broad­cast­ing archive match­es with new com­men­tary from the likes of Tom Moody and Ian Bish­op, to ar­rang­ing for the play­er draft to be done re­mote­ly with a world-class pun­dit­ry pan­el, keep­ing fans en­ter­tained and en­gaged was at the cen­tre of the tour­na­ment’s think­ing.

Dur­ing the tour­na­ment it­self, live CPL games were broad­cast in­to 77 coun­tries on Face­book and YouTube as well as send­ing out high­lights clips world­wide.

The tour­na­ment al­so worked with broad­cast part­ners Sun­set+Vine to cre­ate fun and en­gag­ing con­tent so fans could learn what it was like in­side the tour­na­ment’s bio-se­cure bub­ble. Hero CPL al­so launched the “Life Sto­ries” films on the tour­na­ment’s so­cial me­dia chan­nels. These beau­ti­ful­ly made films fo­cused on the lives of up and com­ing Caribbean crick­eters and won plau­dits from around the world.

Hero CPL has al­so start­ed shar­ing con­tent on a num­ber of new so­cial me­dia chan­nels such as Tik­Tok, Twitch, Triller and In­sta­gram Reels.

Hero CPL’s Head of Mar­ket­ing, Chris Wat­son, said: “Hero CPL has al­ways prid­ed it­self on be­ing at the fore­front of dig­i­tal me­dia and con­tent cre­ation, but in 2020 we re­alised it was even more im­por­tant. Rather than scale down our dig­i­tal out­put dur­ing the pan­dem­ic we took the op­po­site ap­proach to make sure our chan­nels were more en­gag­ing than ever.

"To have de­liv­ered 800mil­lion so­cial me­dia video views this year, in­clud­ing over 300m dur­ing the tour­na­ment, shows that this strat­e­gy was a suc­cess­ful one and to get recog­ni­tion for this from ISC is a fan­tas­tic mo­ment for the tour­na­ment.”