No wonder global online travel players are all trying to get into Indonesia. But for me personally, the most interesting part about our country’s travel story is social.

During the session on ‘Using social media & community to shape travel’, moderated by Morris Sim, CEO & co-founder of Circos Brand Karma, the four panelists talked about how they were tapping social and forming communities around their content and why they were each doing it – a common denominator being because they love to do it.

See, Indonesians are highly social creatures and so we congregate around forums and communities formed by influencers such as the four personalities on the panel. Must be our upbringing or something and as someone from the always-social, digital native generation, I found myself nodding my head constantly throughout the discussion.

Video is huge

Dennis Adishwara

Dennis Adishwara from Layaria.com, an online video aggregator on YouTube, told us that travel video is going to be huge. YouTube, which launched a localised Indonesian site in June last year, is seeing a spike in viewers – this despite government limitations on the Internet and limited bandwidth.

It is now number four on alexa.com’s top sites in Indonesia and it is estimated that Indonesians watch tens of millions of hours of YouTube daily.

There is also no shortage of content creators to keep the online video platforms busy. Why? Because Indonesians like to talk and when we talk, we can’t stop. So making a worldwide trending topic has never been easier, said Adishwara, as users share and re-share content 24/7.

We also don’t sleep. Just kidding. We do sleep. But even in our sleep, we make sure the followers know that we are sleeping (We use Path, like all the time). Come to think about it, social is a major part of our everyday life. We post everything online. The food we’re eating, the places we’re checking in, a glimpse of every travel spot we’re entering, just to get a “like” or a comment from our friends.

Pics and more pics, please

Kristupa Saragih

Kristupa Saragih, the founder and initiator of the biggest photographer community in Asia – fotografer.net, said that he takes pictures to inspire local people to discover new places and to travel more.

A former geologist, he started taking photographs as a hobby and found them a great outlet for his creativity. Every photo tells a different story, he said, depending on the eye of the beholder. His site has 459,000 members as of March 21.

Amalla Vesta

Amalla Vesta, with her Twitter account @LiburanLokal, is also experiencing the same social success. She started as an ordinary traveler, sharing pictures of her vacations, and blogging about the local travel destinations.

Right now, she has more than 150,000 followers, sharing information on their trips and uploading photos of the most happening travel spots in the country.

Marischka Prudence (below), a TV personality turned travel blogger, also shares journeys she’s been to in her blog. She tweets about them, she posts them on Google+, shares the itineraries. Responses are amazing, she said. People are asking her where she travels to and what to do and so she is also a travel consultant at Valadoo, a daily deals tour and activities site, which was recognized by WIT as the “Rising Star” in its Start-Up Pitch. 

Youth rules!

All of their followers are social media junkies – mainly young people who are digital natives. And because they are very social, they like to do it as a group. Most of the social travellers are college students or fresh graduates. Because of their limited travel budgets, online travel communities are a good way to travel in groups.

It seems to be a win-win really – they get to travel cheap with their friends, the community gets talked about by them on social media and, in the process, they create content for the forums.

So the upshot is, Indonesians want the world to know where we are going, what we do – especially when we travel to new places. Where our friends go, we go. And how do we know what they are up to? Social media, of course!