So me and another friend set out to create a schedule viewer that will give us match info within 1~2 secs and wrote a simple but interactive schedule viewer[1] with AngularJS over a weekend. We posted it to r/cricket subreddit but didn't get more than couple hundred views. I also tried tweeting other former cricketers,cricket writers but my tweet got buried in no time because these people had fans ranging from 100k to 2mil.
Then I noticed espencricinfo.com website had a twitter section that listed tweets from all these prominent cricket figures in real-time as they were tweeted.
So during the match when everybody was watching and tweeting, I started tweeting these folks link to our interactive dashboard. This increased chance of them seeing my tweet and we got RTs from a lot of them this way. Of course for that our dashboard had to be the best out there and it was (it worked on mobile browser too).
With just few tweet to celebrity cricketers/sports writers we went from hundreds to over 30k page view and 7k recurring viewers over the course of world cup. The key I think was to get noticed when they were most active and also have a nice app/content to convince them to RT.
Kudos for pushing it during the match.
I've also seen that in the middle of an event people often get social, especially if it is a bit slower moving (cricket game to military parade) and sociability is a major part of being there in the first place. To talk cricket.
Just to make sure I understand correctly: was it the timing during a match that made the difference? Because you knew they were online and able to respond?
This could probably be abstracted to app promotion.