[majormajor]

Almost every influencer starts out as a "random person." Trump started out as just another random B-lister - a larger audience than a non-celebrity anybody, but hardly the audience he ended up with. Social media, with its broadcasting of things to everybody instead of just to a particular small-to-medium sized group of forum participants, enables them to gain massive audiences. Getting that audience as a forum poster would have been far more difficult. The path looked more like "author at a online magazine" than "now has millions on millions of Twitter followers."

[Iefthandrule]

Trump wasn't some random person though--he had a huge financial and social network before he became notorious in politics on Twitter. It does not follow that every influencer starts out as a random person at all.