Social Influencers Stay Free At This Hotel

Social media influ­encers are being offered a sub­stan­tial dis­count or a com­plete­ly free stay at Nordic Light Hotel in exchange for sta­tus updates.

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Stock­holm’s Nordic Light Hotel have set a new dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing prece­dent in the hotel sec­tor. Social media influ­encers are being offered a sub­stan­tial dis­count, or in some cas­es a com­plete­ly free stay at the hotel, at the cost of a few mere sta­tus updates. In exchange, the hotel hopes to cre­ate aware­ness with the help of these influ­encers while adding loy­al cus­tomers.


As out­lined on the lux­u­ry hotel’s web­site, pop­u­lar indi­vid­u­als with 500 or more Face­book friends can receive a 5 per­cent dis­count on their book­ing, and super-savvy social media influ­encers with over 100,000 fol­low­ers on Face­book or Insta­gram can stay at the hotel com­plete­ly free!

With stays in the lux­u­ry hotel usu­al­ly cost­ing $360 per night, evi­dent­ly, there is clear val­ue for the hotel in attract­ing influ­encers to pro­mote their brand. As report­ed by UPI: Nordic Light Hotel CEO Mar­cus Majew­s­ki believes the pro­mo­tion­al ben­e­fits far out­weigh the cost of giv­ing away hotel rooms.

While dig­i­tal mar­keters already are ful­ly aware of the pow­er of social media influ­ence in pro­mot­ing brands or prod­ucts, the use of social media fol­low­ings as a direct from of cur­ren­cy (or dis­counts) by hotel brands is still rel­a­tive­ly unadopt­ed.

Brands Accepting Social Currency

Could such uses of social cur­ren­cy gain wide­spread adop­tion? In the­o­ry, social cur­ren­cy could be valu­able to many brands, and there have been instances of oth­er brands reward­ing social influ­encers in return for pro­mot­ing a prod­uct or ser­vice to their net­works.

Ear­li­er this year, Marc Jacobs opened a ‘Tweet Shop’ dur­ing New York Fash­ion Week that enabled shop­pers to pur­chase any­thing from per­fume sam­ples to high­er val­ue items like sun­glass­es and hand­bags, in return for shar­ing images with the hash­tag #MJDaisy­Chain.

In a mod­ern Warhol-esque recre­ation of the noto­ri­ous ‘Fac­to­ry’, Sour Patch Kids have estab­lished ‘the Patch’. A house where musi­cians can stay free of charge in return for doing what they love best – mak­ing music and occa­sion­al con­tent for shar­ing via social media plat­forms.

An imple­men­ta­tion of social cur­ren­cy in ecom­merce can be found in Door­man, a San Fran­cis­co-based start­up offer­ing an app for con­sumers to place order for ship­ments. While the ser­vice costs $7, Door­man deliv­ers for free to any cus­tomer post­ing a tweet on Twit­ter or sta­tus update to Face­book. Cofounder and CEO Zan­der Adell believes this sim­ple exchange helps spread the company’s brand mes­sage while rein­forc­ing loy­al cus­tomers.

The devel­op­ment of social media pro­mo­tion as an exchange between con­sumers and brands rec­og­nizes the grow­ing impor­tance of the chan­nel as a means of rais­ing aware­ness and reach­ing new cus­tomers.

In trav­el, for exam­ple, where a per­son­al rec­om­men­da­tion from a friend often has a con­sid­er­able impact on a con­sumers choice of des­ti­na­tion or hotel, a pow­er­ful social media influ­ence can have a very pos­i­tive impact on hotel book­ings. The Nordic Light Hotel are act­ing as pio­neers, in a move how­ev­er that makes a great deal of sense.

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Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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