Indonesian University Creates Social Networking Site For Orientation

It has long been a problem for students in remote areas around Indonesia to find reliable and comprehensive information about universities and college life. Thanks to Pinteraktif, a start-up that focuses on end-to-end e-learning solutions, students can now find the info they need over social media.

Pinteraktif developed a social networking site called masukitb.com (or “enter ITB” in English) in September 2010. They are aiming to help high school students learn more about Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), one of the best public universities in Indonesia.

Hendi Wahyu Indratno, the creator of this site, told Penn-Olson that there are four reasons behind the development of Masukitb:

1. High school students keep asking the same questions about college life at ITB (e.g. regarding majors, tuition fees)
2. Teenagers are avid social media users
3. Internet access is improving in Indonesia
4. He believes there are many people and institutions who are willing to help the students.

The idea is providing a medium for anyone from the campus to assist the high school students to plan their study on that campus and find the best way to start.

As a social networking site, Masukitb provides basic features such as profile page, activity feed, messaging and friending system. Users can update their status, post articles or upload photos or videos. Masukitb also provides a tab on its activity feed for Testimonials, not about other users, but about departments or programs taught at ITB. To add a testimonial, users only have to answer two questions: “Why did you choose the program?” and “What did you get from the program”. This feature clearly reflects one of the main purposes of this site, which is to help students to understand what they can expect from programs at ITB before they choose their majors.

Room to Grow

Basically, the main target users of this site are high school students in their final year and ITB freshmen, as we can see from the picture below. However, there are possibilities to take it even further as more and more people participate.

It has been running for almost a year, but it still has a ‘beta’ tag. Nevertheless, its growth is impressive. The number of members, unique visitors, page views and contents published are all growing steadily. On April 2011, Masukitb had 3,388 members, 85,231 unique visitors and 522,201 page views.  Interestingly, the early members of this site were predominantly college students, but this was surpassed by high school students in the beginning of 2011 as you can see below. The site also has a twitter account (@masukitb) with more than 7,200 followers.

Since it is intended to be a social business, all services are provided for free. Hendi and his team at Pinteraktif are still bootstrapping and trying to get funds from CSR, personal donations or fees from sponsored contents.

Pinteraktif has plans to carry it to a higher level, such as applying this model to other universities around Indonesia, applying a crowdfunding model to provide scholarship for students in need, or developing a monthly deposit program for donors to keep the site running and sustainable.

This site might bring to mind the early years of Facebook, which was provided exclusively for Harvard students and then spread to other campuses and to the world. But Masukitb is just a little more ‘serious,’ since you have no idea about things like friends’ interests or relationship status. You can only find their school or their majors.