Skip to content

Maktaba Books – it’s alive and growing

We were featured on Halaltrip’s podcast (see video below) and it gave us a slight boost in following but a huge boost in conversions. Somehow we saw an increased in books borrowed after the podcast happened. Perhaps it gave us some legitimacy and users have more trusts in us.

As mentioned in the previous update, we went past 500 followers, so we did an achievement post (see image below). We discovered that we have had 41 books borrowed in total. And that was quite shocking to find out that the uptake has been that good.

See the full achievement post on @maktaba_books Instagram Here

Apart from those achievements, we also realised that the dismal conversion rate was not because our website was horrible but it was due to not telling users to borrow and what to borrow. We just needed more intentional traffic. So to do this, we started publishing book recommendations based on the categories we have. This lets our followers know what the categories mean and what books they should read, killing two stones with one bird 🪨🪨🐤. To make it more actionable, we reshared those posts as a story and included a link sticker to the book page to borrow it. It has been super effective, the new Instagram update has been super useful.

We also made another interesting discovery – our followers like to engage with content around questions or quizzes. This happened when we decided to share a random Malay vocabulary test by the Bulan Bahasa account asking what is a Violin called in Malay. It somehow blew up, we received 20 over messages answering it trying to find out if their answer was right. It’s still a preliminary finding, we will need to test this theory out more before we can confidently say that they love that kind of content. 🤓

We also have some internal updates – our partner, Quiet, have officially opened their co-working space. Their space holds our donated books and users can choose to do a book pick up there instead of a meet up of mail delivery.

Another news is that we now have a new Developer joining the volunteer team. We may also get another 2 volunteers joining our team – a UX Designer and another marketing team member. That would make us a team of 7 😱. Alhamdulillah, truly amazed and grateful to get to work with such generous people that want to contribute. 🥺