For most of the last five years, Reid Mottet’s squarely four-figure follower counts on Instagram and TikTok were too small to interest big brands in her services as a momfluencer.
Now some marketers are saying she doesn’t need to win more friends before she influences people.
Major brands including baby food maker Little Spoon, fitness chain SoulCycle and retailers American Eagle and Target in the past year have introduced initiatives that compensate budding creators for posting about or interacting with their brands online—a strategy that until recently was employed only by smaller brands that couldn’t afford the rate cards of bigger influencers. In some cases, people with as few as 500 followers can get in the game.
The new efforts mean practically everybody with a social-media account has the opportunity to play endorser, even if, at least at first, the payout from brands may be underwhelming. Some programs are even advertised as quasi-training academies to help nascent influencers launch their online careers, guiding them through the content-creation process and dangling the prospect of having their work reposted from brand accounts. Compensation usually arrives in the form of gift cards, discounts and free swag.
About 45% of total U.S. influencer marketing spending will go toward those with a following of less than 20,000 in 2026, up from 19.5% in 2021, according to a forecast by research firm Emarketer. The share of spending on so-called nanoinfluencers with less than 5,000 followers will increase to 19.9% in 2026, up from just 3.1% in 2021.
Advertisers also have grown more comfortable letting go of creative control as users turn away from picture-perfect posts in search of the ostensibly real, relatable and often kooky content that TikTok has made popular, said Isha Patel, the co-founder of Kale, an app that pays users for completing social-media challenges for clients like Chili’s and Southwest Airlines. A recent challenge from the cleaning brand Scrub Daddy tasked users with filming themselves shopping at Home Depot for its BBQ Daddy scrubbing product.
“You can, as a brand, spend a quarter or two quarters of a million hiring an agency and a film crew to get that perfectly polished, scripted video,” Patel said, “and audiences will just swipe right past it.”
Programs that encourage even more people to post ads online represent another blow for critics concerned that the internet is being overrun by promotional and inauthentic activity, filled with posts from bots, clippers, AI salespeople and paid endorsers no matter how low their profiles. Brands and companies like Duel and Kale say they use technology and human assessments to make sure members of brand advocacy programs tag their content to convey its promotional nature.
For some brands, advocacy programs allow them to gain control of an online behavior taking place organically. Many people have taken to posting in earnest about their favorite brands without any incentive, essentially influencing on spec, as they angle for a slice of the $21 billion that Emarketer says U.S. creators will earn this year. Some have even resorted to faking influencer deals by posting variations of #ad on their posts.
Target is already organically mentioned tens of thousands of times a day on social media, according to the retailer’s chief digital and revenue officer, Sarah Travis, who leads the Club Target program.
“It’s really about providing a system, a tool, a program to reward them for the work that they’re already doing,” she said. “And over time encourage them to create more content, and lean even more heavily into the brand and feel even more connected to us.”