One of the most fruitful panels I attended at this year's International Communication Association conference concerned the definition of "influencer." The term has always rubbed me the wrong way, always sounded like self-serving marketer-speak that misleads us about how influential anyone is online. As Crystal Abidin of Curtin University pointed out during the panel, the term is deployed strategically. If calling yourself an influencer makes you money and avoids the kind of regulation to which professional media producers are subject, then that's what you'll call yourself.
What are the alternatives? "Content producer" is certainly less aggrandizing, but it also makes no claim with regard to reach, engagement, or any other metric of success. Even if only a few people watch my videos, I'm still a content producer. The same could be said of platform-specific or media-specific monikers like YouTuber, TikTokker, podcaster, streamer, or vlogger/blogger. There needed to be some term that differentiated online content producers with a certain level of success - however one wanted to define and measure success - from those without it.
For a time, that term was "micro-celebrity," a name as diminishing (who wants to be thought of as a "micro" anything?) as "influencer" is aggrandizing. Aside from their opposite associations, differences in name matter for scholars, journalists, or interested members of the public seeking out research on this phenomenon. Search the databases for articles, chapters, and books on "influencers" and you'll be missing some of the most important work on the topic, like Alice Marwick's work on successful YouTubers - highly applicable to the successful TikTokkers we now refer to as "influencers." So, that was one takeaway: if you're interested in influencers, start with the scholarly work done on micro-celebrity.
Number of followers = Influencer?
The European Commission defines Influencers as "content creators who often advertise or sell products on a regular basis." While this jibes with most people's conception of Influencers, it doesn't seem inclusive enough. It rules out anyone with a large audience who makes money through Patreon or pre-roll ads (which, I would think, is the platform advertising rather than the content creator, but the creator still gets a cut of the ad revenue) instead of overt paid promotion. Such a user might be highly influential - raising awareness of a cause or an approach to investing or a political candidate - but would not meet the strict legal definition set forth by the European Commission.
Most of the research on Influencers, both qualitative and quantitative, points to some metric - usually the user's number of followers - as evidence that they are, in fact, an influencer. As best I can tell, the cut-off for Influencer status is arbitrary and/or based on round numbers chosen by marketing professionals. The bare minimum seems to be 1,000 followers, qualifying for the lowest tier of influencer - the "nano-influencer."
In addition to metrics, there seems to be an aesthetic component to the accepted definition of Influencer. Accounts referred to as Influencers tend to feature individuals or, less frequently, duos or families, and they typically appear in all or most of their videos, typically directly addressing the camera/audience. A popular (and, perhaps, highly influential) account that compiled thematically related clips would not fit this aesthetic description nor would an account run by a group of comedians. And yet sometimes, such accounts are referred to as influencers.
Are Influencers Actually Influential?
Why does it matter whom we call influencers? What are we assuming about them when we take them as a starting point to studying or reporting on some social phenomenon?
All members of the ICA panel seemed skeptical that everyone, or even most, influencers are especially influential, and skeptical of the direct relationship - often assumed by journalists, users, and even researchers - between follower count and influence. Marketers would tell you that "reach" is an important aspect of influence, but not the only aspect. To be influential, it helps to be well liked. And sure, the act of following an account implies affinity, but how many of those who follow an account see every post, "like" every post, and have their beliefs, attitudes, or behavior influenced by every post? A subset of followers actually see any given post, and of that, a smaller subset might be persuadable, depending on their mood and the proximity between their current beliefs and attitudes and those of the influencer.
Most press articles and more than a few academic articles and books about influencers don't make the distinction between reach and influence. At best, these models of influence lack nuance but are still fundamentally sound. All things being equal, a content creator with 1,000,000 followers is probably more influential than one with 10,000 followers. This kind of relative judgment of influence is a logic that underpins the entire advertising industry; an industry, it should be noted, that gave rise to the term "influencer." How effective is a given ad at persuading people to purchase a product? Surprisingly, it's still difficult to tell.
Part of the reason it's difficult to tell is that companies creating and selling ads don't have much incentive to prove the magnitude of their efficacy. All they have to prove to companies seeking to promote their goods and services through advertising is the relative advantage in the marketplace compared to their competition. As long as they are more visible to potential consumers than the competition, they're more likely to sell more products or services than the competition.
But for those of us who care less about selling one particular set of products or services and care more about influence in general (who to vote for, whether or not to get vaccinated, changing one's beliefs about capitalism or gender equality, etc.), the magnitude of influences matter. Simply equating exposure with influence puts us back at the hypodermic needle model of media effects - everyone who is exposed to a media message reacts to it the same way. That theory was debunked (or at least modified) over 60 years ago by the Limited Media Effects paradigm.
Some might argue that its different this time around. Influencers are more influential than standard mediated promotion because audiences/followers feel as though they have a relationship with the influencer (i.e. a parasocial relationship), and because influencers are perceived to be more authentic than celebrities. At times, they actually interact with audience members through comments or replies. We know that one's peers can have an influence many times greater than that of impersonal mass promotion campaigns, and the relationship between influencers and their followers is thought to be like those of peers. For the relatively few followers who repeatedly comment and receive replies from influencers (i.e., interact with them repeatedly), this seems plausible. For the majority (90-95% of followers, I'd guess) who don't, it seems more like the relationship between a talk show host and their audience - more personal (and thus more influential) than the relationship between a fictional character and an audience or mass advertising and an audience, but less than an actual close friend. Might influencers be more influential than impersonal TV advertising? Sure, but that's a pretty low bar.
It seems most likely to me that influencers are highly influential under certain conditions. They're probably good at directing attention to people, places, or things that have yet to attract much attention. They can take an unknown product, social cause, political candidate, or location and make it enormously popular (or enormously hated) overnight. It strikes me as far less likely that influencers can get people to change their minds about a person, place, or thing once their audience already know about it and have formed an opinion about it. This is nothing new: that's how persuasion works - easy when people don't have an awareness or opinion of something or someone, difficult when they already do. Any marketer, campaign manager, or media effects researcher from 60 years ago could have told you that. So, a more accurate moniker for influencers might be "attention directors."
The Real Influencers
Consider this alternative: perhaps the people who "like," share, repeatedly view, or discuss content online have the greatest amount of influence in our current mediascape. This largely anonymous, highly engaged group is far smaller than the general public, and in most cases smaller than the audience, which includes casual, less engaged people. The influence of the highly engaged group over the influencer is subtle, but worth thinking about.
It might help to take the perspective of someone who sets out to be an influencer. They have something they want to say, some "self" they want to express. They express it...and get very little attention from audiences. Disappointed, they take a quick scan of the most popular influencers overall and in their particular domain (say, gaming, sports, or political commentary). They get a sense of the things those people say or do that make them popular - aesthetic choices like editing pace and clarity of message, but also ideological choices, embodiments of personality, tone, language, sense of humor, etc. They begin to adopt some of these, reluctant to wander too far away from their original expression of self, both because it makes them uncomfortable and because they worry about being perceived as inauthentic. They get a bit of positive feedback - more likes, more comments, more attention - and so they keep doing it.
The collective influence of the highly engaged audience over the influencer might be even subtler than that. Maybe the influencer watched thousands of videos while growing up, simply seeking what most audiences seek - entertainment. Through that process, they absorbed online norms, gradually developing an intuition about what differentiates popular content on a given topic and within a given online subculture from less popular content within that context. At some point, they decide to try their hand at creating content, but what it occurs to them to create - the range of expressive possibilities - is inevitably shaped by what they've already watched. They're not consciously trying to mimic the existing content that effectively caters to audiences' preferences and values, but are apt to cater to them nonetheless. That influencer becomes popular - they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views. But what they say and how they say it must conform to the preferences and values of the highly engaged audience, or else it wouldn't become popular in the first place.
Again, this is nothing new. Novelists, TV writers, and screenwriters know that in order to reach a large enough audience to make for a sustainable career in a capitalist marketplace, you need to - in some sense - cater to a highly influential subset of that audience (critics, opinion leaders, execs). It's crass to think that way - most creators want to see their work as pure acts of self-expression and creativity uninfluenced by the marketplace. And this is not to say that there isn't any original creativity on the part of the artist or content creator. In fact, all audiences demand it: if you simply serve them up something that already existed, they wouldn't bite. There has to be some element of novelty to it, some spark of originality, individuality, and authenticity...but it also needs to fit within a set of generic conventions, and those conventions are articulated through the habits of audiences or some highly engaged subset of the audiences. In the box office business model of media, one person's dollar is as good as another's. In the ad-supported model, certain demographics are more valued than others. And in the online attention economy, the highly engaged audience determines the downstream visibility of content, and is thus more valuable and more influential.
Reasons to be Skeptical
A lot of people want to believe that influencers (or, more broadly, any content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or X/Twitter) are influential. The content creators themselves (obviously) want to believe that they have influence, and so do many researchers and journalists. It doesn't have to be so, but I think there is a bias among many who study and write about influencers to find evidence of significant influence, to protect their work against accusations of triviality, something that scholars of popular culture have dealt with for decades. My sense is that young researchers are drawn to study social media because they believe that it matters, that it is influential, so there's a bit of self-selection bias - they enter the arena looking for evidence of influence. Social media platforms want to highlight such evidence because it makes their companies more valuable, but also (somewhat less cynically) more important; their work matters. Governments, parents, and pretty much everyone else stand to benefit by ascribing blame for every social ill on social media and, by extension, influencers. There is little downside (at least for the blamers) to blaming greedy billionaires, narcissistic influencers, and opaque algorithms for social ills. Its certainly easier than fixing other long-entrenched causes of systemic inequities or one's own personal issues, or simply accepting that humans were never designed to optimize social harmony or happiness.
That's not to say we shouldn't strive for greater social harmony and happiness; only that we should avoid seeking comfort in scapegoats. How do we know when influencers, social media platforms, or algorithms are merely scapegoats and not genuine threats? This is the hard work of good media research.
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