Bracketology Goes Social as Fanhood Offers Major Updates to March Madness Betting

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fanhood, the fast growing social sports betting application on Facebook, today announced the launch of its Most Social March Madness Brackets. This is the first March Madness bracket specifically designed to leverage Facebook features and communication channels, and the latest in a series of growth efforts made by the company to bring fun, easy and free sports betting action to the Facebook platform.

“Fanhood’s March Madness bracket is providing a fun, easy way to enjoy the Tournament with a broader group of friends”

The Most Social March Madness Brackets by Fanhood is deeply integrated with Facebook using Open Graph, Comments and Feeds to help friends engage in the tournament action they care about. Fanhood also offers a suite of additional sports game formats such as challenges, pools and trivia games to keep players engaged and busy during any breaks in the tournament.

“Fanhood’s March Madness bracket is providing a fun, easy way to enjoy the Tournament with a broader group of friends,” said Brandon Ramsey, CEO and founder of Fanhood. “This long overdue modernization of ‘bracketology’ will give a serious social boost to the tournament and is a big win for fans.”

Eligible participants in the Most Social March Madness Brackets by Fanhood will have a shot at winning a $4,000 cash prize. Contest entries can be collected by picking winning teams in each round, having friends who have completed brackets on Fanhood, visiting friends’ brackets, or having a winning bracket. For more information, go to apps.facebook.com/fanhood.

Fanhood, which launched in the fall of 2012, has contributed to the rapidly growing Social Casino space with the introduction of a social betting platform that engages sports fans in a lighter-weight, less time consuming, year-round alternative to Fantasy Football. The NCAA tournament is one of the many sporting events that Fanhood is using to draw players in.

With more than half the world’s population made up of sports fans, sports is poised to be the largest category in social casino. Thirty-five million people participated in Fantasy leagues last year; an estimated 75 million completed a March Madness bracket. Globally, the numbers explode as you include activity around sports like cricket and soccer, which draw in two and three billion fans, respectively.

With strong data analysis capabilities, Fanhood has built a valuable set of “fanalytics,” processing structured and unstructured social data with a proprietary affinity engine to surface the most interesting sports content for Fanhood users.

As Sports fans eagerly await selection Sunday on March 17^th, Fanhood has some Fun Fan Facts to share from a recent (March 2013) poll:

A Love Hate Relationship for Duke: 42 percent of fans rated Duke as the “most annoying/arrogant” college team, yet one in four are betting they win the whole thing – even with their early-round loss last year
Florida Flack: Only 12 percent of respondents plan to place Florida in the winning position in their bracket, while more than one third (34 percent) think they will be ousted from the tournament early – before the likes of Indiana and Duke
Better Luck Next Time: 40 percent predict that Villanova will not even make the tournament
Fair Weather Fans: Most respondents admitted to little to no college love in the regular season – with nearly 40 percent confessing they had watched 0-10 games so far

About Fanhood

Fanhood is a leading social application developer that brings the sports content you care about to Facebook in fun formats to share and compete with friends. Place bets, answer trivia questions and compete in pools to test your Fanhood. It’s free to play and always has fresh action so get in the game!