Review of Headtalker as a Promotional Tool

In an earlier post I described in a fair amount of detail how to use the Social Media aggregating site Headtalker as a promotional tool. I had used it to promote my campaign for my novel The Predator and The Prey in its Amazon Kindle Scout campaign.

My campaign on Headtalker had 51 supporters which provided an impressive Social Media reach of 1,087,260 social media accounts whose owners promised to mention my Kindle Scout campaign and provide a link to the novel's campaign page.

Kindle Scout provides analytics for where the nominations come from. Out of my 1,087,260 individuals, my Kindle Scout campaign received seven total nominations. 

Not a good return for the time I spent learning how to use the site and recruiting supporters.

I did learn something valuable from the experience which has not turned me off completely from ever using Headtalker again.

The overwhelming majority of the Social Media accounts my campaign received were Twitter accounts. Puzzled by the poor results, (.0000064 per Social Media account) seven visits out of the million plus reach, made me do a little research about the effectiveness of Social Media for promoting a specific item like a book or a promotional campaign.

What I learned fit the results of my Headtalker campaign. Facebook is the king of Social Media when it comes to selling or promoting an item, i.e. getting people to click on a link to visit something you want them to visit.

The absolute worse form of Social Media for producing the desired marketing behavior? Twitter. Tumbler and Linkedin aren't much better. Needless to say, the bulk of my million plus Social Media accounts for the program were Twitter accounts.

Checking the various Social Media accounts that did produce clicks and nominations, the head of the list was, sure enough, Facebook. The Facebook accounts that generated the traffic included my own Facebook author page, seven Facebook pages from the Headtalker campaign, Facebook groups for authors and those of Friends and Family who shared my link.

I won't rule out using Headtalker again in the future. But if I do, I will focus heavily on recruiting Supporters whose Social Media reach is based on Facebook.