Telegram is an anonymous messaging platform with awesome features that have come to dominate more and more industries in the last two years. Above them, all is the crypto industry. Telegram is considered to be the best channel for startups to raise awareness for their initial coin offering. But it’s not just crypto – Telegram also has groups for discussions on marketing and sales, groups to purchase flights and travel packages and even groups for immediate updates about and from politicians. You name it and it’s there.
That’s because Telegram brings several advantages to users over competitors like WhatsApp. For businesses, Telegram has channels and groups, which can host thousands of community members. Telegram’s secret chat is one of the most technologically secure ways to communicate over the internet. Phone numbers can be kept private through Telegram’s username feature and various bots are compatible with Telegram, expanding its functions.
Why not bot?
But Telegram isn’t all sweet-smelling roses. If you maintain a Telegram group of at least a couple hundred members, you’ve almost certainly encountered a number of problems that make your life more difficult.
First of all, most groups need moderators. No one wants their group to turn into a spam magnet, so they have to delete every message that isn’t on topic, block people who misbehave and make sure that members are generally following the rules. Secondly, they have to answer questions and have discussions with group members – that is the goal here after all. What’s more, if you want to make sure there is continued activity in your group, you also need to be active yourself by posting topics for discussion, playing games, encouraging conversations, welcoming people when they join and more.
All of these requires manpower and time. That’s not bad, that’s just the work. But what happens when you have hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of people in your group? Maybe you have Superman working for you, but maintaining groups like this once took up 85% of our community manager’s time until she threw up her hands and said, “What is this? I feel like a robot!” So why not free up her time by assigning these tasks to a real bot?
All about bots
Telegram allows for the creation and connection of bots. These beyond-useful tools function as Telegram accounts that are operated by AI rather than a person. But users can interact with bots similarly to how they interact with people (within the bots’ functional parameters of course).
Looking for the perfect image reply? Just message ImageBot and tell it what kind of image you need. Want to create a poll for members of your group to participate in? PollBot is the perfect tool for that. Telegram has made bots easily accessible and even offers tools to create new bots, growing the number of possibilities and expanding Telegram’s usefulness.
A bot of our own
There are lots of bots on the market for free and others you need to pay for. Either way, they offer many comfortable functions. Besides images and polls, there are game bots, bots that find music for you, bots that help you trade in currency, and yes, bots that help moderate your groups.
Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to using existing bots. On one hand, they are ready to be used! The developers who built the bots have already tested them, fixed them, improved them and made sure they work without any glitches. Some bots even have technical support to help you in case you encounter a problem.
Building a new bot requires at least basic knowledge in how to create and add bots to the platform, a programmer who knows how to write the proper code, an internet interface developer who can make the bot easy to use for people who aren’t developers and a rigid process of quality assurance. But on the other hand- the big advantage is that the resulting bot can do exactly what you want.
As a company that does community management, we wanted a special bot that could precisely meet our specific needs. When we couldn’t find one already in existence, we decided to create our own.
So what does this bot do?
- It kindly welcomes new users in a dynamic fashion
- It allows us to schedule future messages
- It allows us to create a bank of messages that can be sent at random
- It gives us statistics on users in the group
- It deletes messages with spam keywords we set ahead of time
It does several other things besides, and because it’s ours, we can keep developing it according to new needs that arise and add new features to it whenever we feel like.
Now, our community manager can focus on creating quality connections and having real conversations with people instead of writing the word “Welcome” a thousand times every day.