Social network that focus on travel Burufly announces its undisclosed investment from Walden International and Batavia Incubator. According to e27, the investment will help Burufly to expand to the region, with Thailand currently on the list. What’s in my mind, however, it’s not about the destination, it’s more about the audiences.
With under 150,000 monthly active users, Burufly should and would acquire new users to have better leverage. If it’s not able to gain it from local audiences, that would mean Burufly should search for new market. The problem lies on how Burufly attracts users from other countries on getting to know Indonesia and its beautiful scenery.
Burufly needs further press coverage, more marketing spending (especially targeting foreign country) and more support on the site. While it’s entirely written in English (and we choose this option) to helping foreigners to understand the site navigation, I still don’t get it why the “wants” and “had/already” of each item should be displayed as “Mau” and “Pernah”. It limits the basic interaction of a social network (for non-Indonesian users) and this thing should never be happened in the first place.
More problem is already admitted by Burufly about how to make consumers keep visiting the site. Peter Goldworthy from Burufly told e27 that there is “[t]oo much commerce, too little content. Content will drive commerce in the long run, since there are so many destinations that are still relatively unknown in Southeast Asia. Making that content scalable and engaging so that it is worth visiting coming back to every day is the holy grail.”
Maybe we can start it with fresh contents delivered everyday to the mailbox. Since it mimics The Fancy’s behavior, email marketing should be one of the primary method to keep people coming. Mobile apps for popular platforms (or at least mobile version) will also help as current site isn’t fully optimized for mobile.
Other that that, Burufly is on the right track. Placed itself as The Fancy for traveling scheme, Burufly offers unique social networks, combined with some premium offerings as its business model. It has collection of beautiful Indonesian scenery to create “impulse feeling to travel” for every users, both locals and foreigners. I really do hope Burufly will spark globally to help promote Indonesian tourism.
