Target, Little Spoon pay creators with 500 followers for posts

Brands shift marketing budgets to small creators

Major brands including baby food maker Little Spoon, fitness chain SoulCycle, and retailers American Eagle and Target have introduced initiatives that pay social media users with as few as 500 followers for posting about their products, The Wall Street Journal reported. The programs mark a departure from the traditional influencer model, in which brands worked directly with highly followed creators to produce polished promotional content.

Reid Mottet, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mother from Louisiana, said she recently qualified for Club Target, a gamified advocacy platform that Target introduced in May. The program, which has 15,000 members, encourages users to complete weekly challenges such as posting about a Target shopping haul or liking and commenting on specific Target content. Mottet said she has received a $10 gift card for posts including videos of her trying on clothes in a Target changing room and a roundup of her weekly Target shop. She is close to reaching a second tier worth $15, she said.

“The biggest draw for me is the side of it where I could get brand deals and bring home some money and just help pay for the bills we have coming in,” said Mottet, a registered nurse who also posts as part of Little Spoon’s “Spoon Squad” initiative and recently qualified for Amazon’s affiliate-based influencer program.

The value of audience size has been turned on its head as social media enters what some executives call the post-follower era, according to Paul Archer, the founder and CEO of Duel, a technology platform for brand advocacy programs used by Charlotte Tilbury and Victoria’s Secret. “The way that the algorithms work on social media now means the majority of what you see comes from someone you didn’t choose to follow,” Archer said. Professional creators with large followings can no longer guarantee their audience will see the ads they post, he said, while the work of creators with tiny followings can go viral if their content resonates.

Research firm Emarketer forecasts that about 45% of total U.S. influencer marketing spending will go toward creators with a following of less than 20,000 in 2026, up from 19.5% in 2021. The share of spending on so-called nanoinfluencers with less than 5,000 followers will increase to 19.9% in 2026, up from 3.1% in 2021, according to the forecast.

Advertisers have grown more comfortable relinquishing creative control as users turn away from picture-perfect posts in search of content that feels authentic and relatable, said Isha Patel, the co-founder of Kale, an app that pays users for completing social media challenges for clients such as Chili’s and Southwest Airlines. “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.”

Target is already organically mentioned tens of thousands of times a day on social media, according to Sarah Travis, the retailer’s chief digital and revenue officer, who leads the Club Target program. She said the program is designed to “provide a system, a tool, a program to reward them for the work that they’re already doing. And over time encourage them to create more content, and lean even more heavily into the brand and feel even more connected to us.”

The proliferation of brand advocacy programs represents another development for critics who argue that the internet is being overrun by promotional and inauthentic activity, including posts from bots, AI salespeople, and paid endorsers regardless of their profile size. Brands and companies like Duel and Kale said they use technology and human assessments to ensure members of brand advocacy programs tag their content to convey its promotional nature.