Social media man­agers will be aware that some peo­ple have a tal­ent for pro­duc­ing con­tent that can influ­ence oth­ers on social net­works with ele­gance, humor and orig­i­nal­i­ty; and New York’s social exchange plat­form Headliner.fm has act­ed as an online hub for these tal­ent­ed influ­encers to pro­mote one another’s con­tent since its launch in 2009. But this week, it’s announced a name change and a size­able cash injection.

Not just for musicians

Cour­tesy of a seed fund­ing round led by ff Ven­ture Cap­i­tal, Headliner.fm raised a hand­some $1.8 mil­lion this week and mor­phed into “CoPro­mote” (oth­er par­tic­i­pants includ­ed Alpha Prime Ven­tures, Cor­re­la­tion Ven­tures, Rubi­con Project pres­i­dent Greg Raif­man and The Social Inter­net Fund).

The inquir­ing social media man­ag­er will want to know what prompt­ed the name change and the answer points to the startup’s suc­cess. Orig­i­nal­ly aimed at musi­cians (hence the “fm” bit), its com­mu­ni­ty expand­ed and diver­si­fied to include a whole raft of cre­ators and mar­keters, from blog­gers to online video pro­duc­ers, app devel­op­ers to char­i­ties and small busi­ness­es. Sud­den­ly, hav­ing a name with “fm” in it was start­ing to get a lit­tle mis­lead­ing because it’s cer­tain­ly no longer lim­it­ed to musi­cians. So “CoPro­mote” came to be instead.

Small-bud­get cre­ators, big talent

The startup’s CEO and founder, Mike More, is well aware that oth­er social pro­mo­tion exchanges are out there, like Klout for exam­ple. And his answer to the skep­ti­cal social media man­ag­er who won­ders what’s so unique about CoPro­mote is this: its rivals cater almost exclu­sive­ly to big brand adver­tis­ers, while CoPromote’s tar­get com­mu­ni­ty con­sists of the small­er con­tent pro­duc­ers and con­tent marketers.

For these small but cre­ative types, it doesn’t make sense to adver­tise on Twit­ter, Face­book or YouTube, large­ly because, as More puts it, “they do not deliv­er the one action which con­tent mar­keters val­ue the most: shares or retweets in a man­ner which [makes] eco­nom­ic sense.”

More is clear that peo­ple don’t feel tempt­ed to spam fol­low­ers with ran­dom links; CoPro­mote takes care to match users with con­tent they find rel­e­vant. And with 45,000 dai­ly users, he seems to have struck a chord. CoPro­mote, he claims, can fre­quent­ly lead to 26 times more shar­ing of a post.

The ser­vice is free for sin­gle cam­paigns, but those who want to run more than one simul­ta­ne­ous­ly can upgrade to a sub­scrip­tion service.