Everyone Is Becoming an Influencer - and That Changes the Game for Brands

When we say “influencer”, most of us still picture someone with hundreds of thousands of followers, a carefully curated feed and a management email in their bio.

But increasingly, that isn't what influence looks like.

It's your friend posting the restaurant she went to last weekend. Someone reviewing the moisturiser they've used for six months. The person with 2,000 followers who happens to be really well known in the Manchester running community. Or the parent whose recommendations everyone in the local WhatsApp group actually listens to.

One stat really brought this shift home for us: nearly one in four people across the markets surveyed by Adobe met its definition of a creator. That doesn't mean one in four people are professional influencers, but it does show just how normal creating, sharing and recommending online has become.

Basically, we're all becoming tiny influencers.

And for brands, that could completely change what an influencer strategy looks like.

Influence isn't the same thing as follower count

For years, influencer marketing was relatively easy to visualise. Find a handful of creators with large audiences, agree the deliverables, put the content live and measure how many people saw it.

Follower count made influence feel tangible.

But think about who actually influences your decisions day to day and it gets much messier. You might follow a huge food creator but still book the restaurant your friend recommended. You might see a skincare campaign featuring a celebrity, then search TikTok for reviews from people with the same skin type as you. You might discover a running shoe through a major athlete, but ask someone from your local running club whether it's actually worth buying.

The person with the biggest audience isn't necessarily the person with the most influence over a particular decision.

And social has made those smaller recommendations much more visible.

Welcome to the era of the tiny influencer

We're not suggesting everyone is about to quit their job and become a full-time creator.

The more interesting shift is that the ability to influence has become much more distributed.

Someone doesn't need 500,000 followers to have genuine influence over a community. They might have 2,000 followers, but if they're trusted by runners in Manchester, new parents in Bristol or beauty obsessives in Leeds, that audience could be incredibly valuable to the right brand.

Smaller creators can often have incredibly engaged communities too. That doesn't mean small automatically equals better - a nano creator with the wrong audience isn't suddenly more valuable than a perfectly aligned creator with a million followers.

But it does mean brands need to start asking a slightly different question.

Not “Who has the biggest audience?”

But “Who actually matters to the people we're trying to reach?”

Hyperlocal influence could be the next big shift

This gets particularly interesting when you add location.

Say you're launching a new beauty product nationally. The traditional approach might involve partnering with a relatively small group of recognisable beauty creators who can generate huge reach across the UK.

There's still absolutely a role for that.

But what if you also found the 20 people who genuinely influence beauty purchases in Manchester? Then the 20 in Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Glasgow and every other community that matters to your brand.

Suddenly, instead of a campaign being built around a handful of large creators broadcasting to everyone, you've got hundreds of smaller recommendations appearing inside specific communities.

Influencer marketing starts looking less like mass media and more like community coverage.

Unilever is already thinking this way

This isn't just a theoretical shift. Some of the world's biggest advertisers are already moving in this direction.

Unilever CEO Fernando Fernández has spoken about dramatically increasing the company's use of creators, including an ambition to work with 20 times more influencers. The company has talked about building hyperlocal relevance through creators across individual postcodes and municipalities, and ultimately having creator representation at an incredibly local level around the world.

By mid-2026, Unilever had reportedly grown its creator network from around 10,000 to 300,000.

That's a fundamentally different model of influencer marketing.

Rather than treating creators as a limited number of media placements around a campaign, you're building a distributed network of people who can make the brand visible inside thousands of different communities.

For a global business like Unilever, that scale is enormous. But the principle applies to much smaller brands too.

You don't need to be everywhere. You need to identify which communities actually matter to your growth and who has influence within them.

Bigger creators aren't disappearing

This isn't the death of the macro influencer.

Large creators still offer something incredibly valuable: reach. They can launch products, create cultural moments, introduce brands to millions of people and give campaigns the kind of visibility that would be extremely difficult to recreate through hundreds of smaller accounts.

The change is that they're increasingly becoming one part of a much broader creator ecosystem.

You might have a hero creator generating national awareness, a layer of mid-sized creators translating the campaign into different communities, and dozens or hundreds of nano and micro creators building credibility around particular interests, locations and audiences.

One doesn't replace the other.

The influencer pyramid just gets much, much wider at the bottom.

Your best influencer might already be a customer

There's another reason this shift matters.

As the line between “creator” and “normal social media user” gets blurrier, brands suddenly have a much bigger potential creator pool.

Your customers are already posting. They're doing unboxings, reviews, GRWMs, restaurant recommendations, holiday round-ups, outfit posts and product comparisons without necessarily thinking of themselves as influencers.

Some will have 500 followers. Some will have 5,000. Some might have 50,000.

What matters is whether other people trust what they say.

For brands, that creates an opportunity to think beyond traditional influencer discovery and start identifying influential customers, superfans, employees, experts and community members too.

The next great brand advocate might not have “content creator” in their bio.

But working with thousands of creators sounds slightly terrifying

It is.

The traditional influencer model was built around relatively small numbers of relationships. You could manually find creators, review their profiles, send briefs, manage contracts, approve content and analyse the results.

Try doing that with 10,000 people.

This is where technology becomes essential.

AI can help brands identify creators based on much more than follower count, looking at location, interests, audience, engagement quality, brand safety and genuine participation within particular communities.

It can help cluster creators, match people with relevant products, spot local trends, analyse hundreds or thousands of pieces of content and identify which combinations of creator, message and audience are actually working.

That makes a distributed creator model much more manageable.

But there's an important distinction.

AI can scale the system. It can't manufacture influence.

We're going to see a lot more AI enter influencer marketing over the next few years.

Some of that will be brilliant. Some of it will probably make everyone's inbox considerably worse.

But the most useful role for AI isn't replacing the creator. It's helping brands manage the enormous amount of complexity surrounding them.

Finding the right 200 people manually is difficult. Understanding what's happening across 200 communities is difficult. Working out which creators, messages and pieces of content are actually driving something meaningful is difficult.

Those are exactly the kinds of problems technology can help solve.

What it can't manufacture is the reason somebody listens to a recommendation in the first place.

You trust the person from your running club because they actually run. You trust the beauty creator because they've spent years talking knowledgeably about skincare. You trust your friend because, well, they're your friend.

Technology makes the scale manageable. The influence still comes from humans.

Influencer strategy could become community strategy

This might ultimately be the biggest change.

If influence becomes increasingly distributed, brands will need to stop thinking about influencer marketing purely as buying access to audiences.

Instead, it becomes about identifying the communities that matter and building relationships with the people who have credibility inside them.

That could mean thinking by city, neighbourhood, hobby, profession, life stage, subculture or even a very specific shared obsession.

A running brand doesn't just need “fitness influencers”. It might need marathon runners, trail runners, run-club organisers, physios, coaches, beginners documenting Couch to 5K and the person who somehow knows everyone in Manchester's running scene.

Suddenly, the opportunity gets much richer than a spreadsheet organised from highest to lowest follower count.

So, is everyone really becoming an influencer?

Not in the traditional sense.

Most people aren't going to build huge audiences, sign with talent managers or make a living from brand partnerships. But more of us are creating content, recommending products and places, and shaping the decisions of people around us.

Influence is becoming more distributed, more niche and more local.

For brands, that means the future of influencer marketing probably isn't choosing between one huge creator and 20 smaller ones. It's building the right combination of creators to create genuine influence across the communities that matter.

And as technology makes managing those networks easier, working with hundreds or even thousands of creators becomes much more realistic.

AI might make the network manageable. But it won't make the recommendation believable. That still comes down to a real person talking to a community that trusts them.

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