influencer is one who exerts influence — a person or organization able to sway others without force or direct command — and, most often today, a person who generates interest in something, such as a product, by posting about it on social media.
The word is an agent noun formed from 📝influence, recorded since the 1660s in the general sense of one who or that which influences. In that older sense an influencer is an individual or organization with the capacity to cause an effect in indirect or intangible ways, producing an effect without any apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command. The advertising industry adopted the word around 2000 for people whose social connections set trends, an idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's 📝The Tipping Point; the social media sense was established by about 2010, and Merriam-Webster added it as a dictionary sense in 2019.
An influencer differs from a celebrity, whose fame may rest on work done elsewhere, in that an influencer's value is the trust and attention of an audience, often within a niche; it differs from an authority, whose standing is conferred by position. 📝Influencer Marketing builds campaigns around such people, the 📝Micro-Influencer trades reach for engagement, and the 📝Virtual Influencer and 📝Automated Influence extend the role to fictional personas and machines. In community work the opposing figure is the 📝confluencer, who seeks to 📝bring people together where the influencer seeks to stand apart.
At 📝Ghost Influence I often watched 📝Influence Syndrome at work: influencers trapped in a persona of their former selves, and audiences far more willing to follow a change when they were given context for it.