Forget influencers, welcome to the "alternatively influential."

It’s no secret that the influencer model is cracking.

Audiences are exhausted by polish. Brands are drowning in vanity metrics. And everyone's starting to realise that follower counts mean absolutely nothing if engagement is dead and trust is non-existent.

Enter the alternatively influential. These are people you've probably never heard of who are driving more value than influencers with millions of followers. Some of them have 60k+ followers, some have 3,000 followers and 20% engagement rates.

They live in newsletter subscriber lists, Discord servers, and private Facebook groups that don't show up in traditional influencer discovery tools. And perhaps for brands, these people matter more than the verified checkmarks they've been chasing for years.

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So, what makes someone "alternatively influential?"

The alternatively influential aren't trying to be influencers. Instead, they're experts in their fields, enthusiasts, community builders, newsletter writers, Discord moderators, subreddit leaders.

They have small but deeply engaged audiences who actually trust their recommendations.

They're the person in your running club who everyone asks for shoe recommendations. They’re the employee who posts about their work and gets genuine engagement from people who respect their expertise.

Traditional influencers built followings by being aspirational, polished, and broadly appealing. The alternatively influential built trust by being knowledgeable, authentic, and specifically valuable to a niche audience.

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Why this shift and why now?

AI made polish cheap and authenticity expensive to fake. Anyone can generate perfect images, flawless copy, and polished content at scale (the very things that made influencers attractive). Now, professional-looking content, consistent aesthetics, scalable output have become what makes audiences distrust them.

Polish now often signals fake, while messiness signals human. The alternatively influential win because their content has human quirks that AI can't replicate and audiences can recognise as genuine.

CMOs are noticing, too. In 2025, 81% of surveyed CMOs believed customers would pay more for human-created content, up from 65% the year before. Now, the market is actively rewarding authenticity over production value.

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Well, then, where do I find the alternatively influential?

Traditional influencer discovery tools probably won't help you here. These people rarely show up in things like hashtag monitoring, so you need to look in different places:

• Look at who your employees follow and engage with genuinely
• Browse niche subreddits and note who consistently provides valuable answers
• Join Discord servers related to your industry and identify the active community leaders
• Check newsletter platforms like Substack and Beehiiv for writers in your niche with high open rates

Monitor saves and shares, not just likes. The alternatively influential inspire action. People bookmark their recommendations, forward their newsletters, and actually click through to buy what they suggest.

Your own employees are likely already alternatively influential in their professional networks. Someone on your team posting about their work on LinkedIn to 4,000 connections in your industry could be more valuable than a lifestyle influencer with 400,000 random followers. My company is full of them.

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Why employee generated content works here

Well, your employees are alternatively influential within their professional networks. When someone from your team posts about their work, their industry connections pay attention because it's a genuine insider perspective.

This isn't corporate social media with brand voice and approval workflows. This is individuals sharing what they're excited about, problems they're solving, or lessons they're learning. The authenticity comes from the lack of polish.

Employee-generated content works as a trust signal precisely because it's not marketing. It's someone with real expertise sharing genuine enthusiasm about their work. That credibility can't be manufactured through traditional influencer partnerships.

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Working with the alternatively influential requires more research, more relationship building, and more patience than sending a DM to someone with a verified checkmark.

You can't scale it the way you scaled influencer campaigns. You can't automate discovery. And you def can't demand deliverables (which you shouldn’t be doing anyway).

But the payoff is audiences who actually trust recommendations. Conversions that actually happen. And relationships that last beyond a single campaign cycle.

Traditional influencer marketing optimised for reach and impressions. Working with the alternatively influential optimises for trust and action. Those are fundamentally different goals that require fundamentally different approaches.

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The influencer economy isn't dying, but it is fragmenting.

Mega-influencers will still exist for broad awareness campaigns, of course. But for brands that want more localised influence, nuance, and deep trust, the alternatively influential are where the value lives.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

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