Virat Kohli most popular cricketer on Twitter with 5 mn fans

After being elevated to India's Test Captain, Virat Kohli, whose fan-following on Twitter has already surpassed that of Sachin Tendulkar, went on to become the first cricketer to have 5 million followers on the microblogging site.

Kohli (@ImVkohli) now has 5,004,544 followers on Twitter, ahead of Tendulkar who has 4,910,498 followers and MS Dhoni (3,374,509 followers).

In just over three months, Kohli has gained over a million followers goes to underline his rising popularity, Twitter said in a statement.

He had crossed the the 4 million mark in October 2014. Kohli was also quick to thank his fans on Twitter for putting him on top of the most followed Cricketers on Twitter List and tweeted "Wow that was a quick ride to 5 million! Great start for the new year. Thank you all for making it possible :)".

Some of his top tweets include his "four-million-follower selfie" which was favourited over 3,200 times (similar to likes on Facebook) and re-tweeted more than 1,100 times.

Others in the tally include Virender Sehwag (over 3.2 million followers), Yuvraj Singh (2.7 million), Suresh Raina (2.6 million), Zaheer Khan (1.7 million), Gautam Gambhir (1.65 million) and Rohit Sharma (1.62 million).