Telegram is a popular messaging platform progressively gaining the attention of marketers during the past years. And it’s an awesome marketing tool – learning how to use Telegram for Content Promotion can be a vital step to improve your content promotion strategy.
The Telegram channels come in handy as a tool for content distribution to large audiences since they help individuals or brands stay in direct contact with their followers.
Unlike the content within facebook posts that get likes, in the case of Telegram content distribution, the accent falls on quality rather than quantity.
Functioning as a cloud-based messenger, Telegram stores all types of shared content, without interfering with the device’s performance due to occupying little space. This is an attractive feature, captivating the marketers’ attention, as the channels are able to massively distribute content.
How to Use Channels to Promote Your Content
In the last few years, messenger apps gained more users than social networks. Telegram is the newest messenger app enjoying rapid popularity, on a worldwide scale, having an emergent monthly growth regarding its number of users. Its popularity gave the marketers a new tool for content distribution.
Promote Content on Your Channels
The content is shared through the app’s channels. In other words, a Telegram channel is some sort of a Facebook business or fan page on which entities or individuals share content with their followers. Unlike Facebook, the Telegram channels provide the instant messaging feature, at a zero cost regardless of the amount of shared content or the number of subscribers.
Besides instantly spreading the content among an unlimited number of members, the app allows to easily monitors the number of viewers. Each Telegram channel comes with its own public or private link so anyone can join your channel, via this link, and stay updated upon your shares.
Promote Content on Other Channels
In the case of public channels, the users can freely become part of the channel, unlike the private channels, in which the administrator has the power to select the audience, by accepting or declining users’ requests. Therefore, the private channel prevents the leakage of any confidential or sensitive data.
With the changing News Feed algorithm of Facebook, decreasing the organic reach of posts, instant messaging gains a competitive advantage. Yet, this feature implies that the content is created in a more direct approach to the followers, rather than the common newsletter style.
On the other hand, the Telegram channels come with a Mute Option for the followers, so sharing meaningful content, to your audience, becomes vital. The app allows you to share any type of content, from text and images to audio or video posts. Since most of the consumers use Telegram on a mobile device, your content shall fall within 500 characters.
How to Create Your Own Channel
When it comes to marketing, Telegram is a popular platform due to a useful feature, the channel, which makes up for a great tool to promote a business, company, product, service or anything else worth advertising.
If configured and managed accordingly, a channel can become a great source of information, a good tool for research, or a reliable app to keep you updated on the latest promotions and discounts. Reaching subscribers has never been easier since the app sends instant messages, with your posts, to subscribers’ devices.
Good to Know
Within a Telegram account, you are able to create up to 8 channels. To ensure each channel with a progressive growth, you shall choose an easy-to-remember, catchy name and a concise description of the channel.
Desktop
Creating a channel is a fairly easy process resuming at tapping the “New channel” and “Create new channel” buttons, followed by inserting the channel’s name, description, choosing the public or private feature and adding the contacts. Reaching the above-mentioned buttons depends on the operating system one is using.
Android
In Android devices, you may reach the buttons, and create the channel, by going into the Telegram app and tapping the Pencil icon.
iOS
For the IOS devices, open the app, press the “Chats” tab, followed by the “New Message”. On a Windows or Mac computer, you must open the Telegram software and click the “Burger” icon.
Note: The Telegram channels allow users to instantly share any type of content with a wide number of subscribers. Despite of allowing you to create up to 8 channels, from a single account, each channel can only be managed by its administrator.
Furthermore, the administrator can allow only one co-administrator to manage the same channel. The distributed content is, in fact, the administrator’s post, shared under the channel’s name.
10 Ways to Accelerate your Channel’s Growth
Growing a Telegram channel requires a mixture of creating useful content, sharing it regularly (not to be misled with often) and promoting the channel’s link.
Before starting this endeavor, make sure you have a well-defined content strategy and you’ve already posted some content on your channel. If you have no idea what to post, here are some content marketing examples for inspiration.
Depending on your budget, you may opt for paid or free tactics to increase your followers. Here are six ways to accelerate your channel’s growth:
1. Use social media platforms
Begin by adding the channel’s link on your social media pages and use Facebook ads to promote it. Another trustworthy tactic is to add the channel’s link on your website, to your contact us page or on the landing page. The last one is a great, visible place as long as is following to the latest landing page trends.
2. Make the channel’s link your signature
Add your channel within all your communication materials and tools: in your email signature, in articles, at the end of your social media posts.
3. Opt for blog articles
Write about your channel and optimize the articles for both the search engines and your audience. If individuals finding your blog will be satisfied with the content delivered, they will become followers of your channel. Since images catch your readers’ attention, check out these tips on free sources for blog images.
4. Look for Telegram channel catalogs
If your advertising budget is relatively small, you may rely on advertising through this type of catalog which offer free promotion for Telegram channels as long as you comply with certain rules. One popular catalog is the tgcat channel.
5. Engage in forums
Promote your channel on forums like Quora, Reddit. Create posts and leave your channel in comments to related posts. Since famous brands like IKEA and Adam & Eve use Reddit for their products, you shall also take advantage of this efficient advertising technique to grow your channel.
6. Use paid promotion
Advertising from trustful sources will grow your channel by generating awareness. All you need to do is search for high traffic channels, having similar themes, get in touch with their admins and pay to advertise your channel within their communities. For example, through a telegram ad exchange you can find manually verified channels and bots of various topics and buy ads in them.
7. Do not forget about Telegram stickers
In order to grow a channel or engage actual subscribers, choose to benefit from the advantage of creating personalized Telegram stickers. One can opt to create its own stickers involving logos, mascots, different messages, with the purpose of advertising the channel in a funny, attractive manner.
The stickers will then be used by your followers and since Telegram enjoys, on a daily basis, around 500,000 new users and more than 70 billion messages shared, imagine what visibility you may achieve with an eye-catchy sticker. And let’s not forget that this is absolutely free.
8. Reposting content within your community’s area of interest
Any type of content on topics among your subscribers’ preferences can lead to debates and engagement of your audience. Sharing the latest news on topics of high interest can become a reliable tactic to connect subscribers with your channel’s promoted interests or firm values.
9. Create your own Telegram bot
The telegram bot may help you save some money and manage a reduced team of employees as it can execute a wide range of web-based duties. Depending on one’s programming knowledge, creating a Telegram bot is a fairly easy process.
Alternatively, if you don’t have coding skills, with SendPulse you can easily create your own Telegram chatbot for free.
10. High on low
Sharing content too often might trigger a decreasing number of followers. This is a common mistake done by new channels. Since Telegram is an instant messaging app, receiving too many notifications, from a channel, may become annoying. Therefore, focus on quality content, rather than quantity.
Using the Telegram Bots
As expected, a Telegram bot can be helpful, also, for content distribution as it may be connected to a calendar and can follow a scheduled content sharing strategy.
Additionally, it can collect insights regarding your consumers’ preferences, in terms of content, and can share only meaningful posts, even if we refer to content published by external sources. Practically, a bot may act as a smart newspaper.
Regarding the type of content shared, the Telegram bots can post content of any type, from images, gifs and videos, to documents and text posts.
The bot can be a trustful replacement for a customer service employee as it can offer 24/7 online support, with no supervision needed. It offers a good opportunity to grow your channel since it boots the user experience.
Creating a Telegram bot can be done through the “supreme bot”, the BotFather. Updating, improving or changing any feature, of an existing bot, is also done with the help of Bot Father. The process of creating a bot is neither difficult nor time consuming, however, it requires minimal programming skills.
Top SEO & Marketing Channels
Since we’ve talked on how to use Telegram as a tool for marketing and content distribution, note that there are channels offering useful marketing information to boost your knowledge.
Check below four top-rated, reliable sources of information on topics like SEO and marketing, useful tools, like marketing nps, and several tips to survive this marketing jungle.
- Active Marketing. Rated as the best marketing-related Telegram channel, Active Marketing shares the latest news, tools and trends within the marketing industry, useful for both experienced or brand new marketers.
- Sales and Marketing Class. By joining this Telegram channel, you will get access to a series of materials meant to improve your sales and marketing abilities. Get the latest insights and marketing-related life hacks.
- GIDSS Marketing Tips. If you are looking for daily tips on social media marketing, this channel is for you. Enjoy short stories, with helpful information, on how to use social media marketing as a tool to promote your business and earn more customers.
- Home Business News and Education. To keep an eye on news and future events, from the world of online marketing, join this channel. Stay updated on subjects like content creation, SEO strategies, marketing and sales for entrepreneurs.
When Telegram is Not Suitable for Content Distribution
Regardless of the benefits this app provides for content distribution, you shall not adopt it as a marketing tool if it is not popular among your target audience.
According to statistics, Telegram encountered, at the beginning of this year, over 60,892,789 downloads, from countries like Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, India, US, Italy, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Mexico and South Korea.
Final Thoughts
Telegram does not allow any form of paid advertising and according to its creators, the app will be free of ads forever. Therefore, as long as Telegram will not permit paid advertising, the only keys to grow your channel, and engage your audience, will rely on the content’s quality and external advertising.
The Telegram bots are a good tool for content distribution, this being only the tip of the iceberg since the bots can successfully replace a wide range of duties managed by humans.
Growing your channel will require more and more content responsibility, along with customer support to successfully maintain your followers. A bot can easily cover a 24/7 customer support duty, improving the overall user experience, while requiring minimal supervision.
Remember, the organic reach and the subscribers do not grow by themselves. Regardless of the communication channel you choose to use and the features it incorporates; your effort will be pointless if the shared content is not meaningful to your audience.
This article was made by Dave Schneider. Dave is the founder of LessChurn. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.
creating the best post on any topic can be a tough task, Great Article Mate just loved it the way you have described.
Nice read… I am a content creator and I can say that most of the blogs do not have Telegram channel. Maybe it’s not that popular yet. But I had been using the app since long and I know what potential it holds in content marketing. Trying to grow my Telegram channel with things you have mentioned. Wish me luck!
Good luck 😉