I wanted to do my own review of Chainfuel PRO but I honestly think that the guys from UTB did a great job with their version so I will just rehost that one here instead. If you own or manage a Telegram group/channel, you will definitely want to check this out!
It’s no secret that Telegram remains dominant platform for crypto communities today.
It’s ubiquity is due in large thanks to its focus on security, data privacy, and encryption (bye, Facebook!).
But as anyone who’s participated in large Telegram communities with thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of members can attest, the mobile chat app doesn’t always scale elegantly with such massive numbers.
Community Managers and admins of such large Telegram communities will have felt this pain even more acutely: while Telegram is a must-have for crypto communities today, managing such communities at scale presents major challenges.
Crypto community managers today are responsible for, among other things:
- Keeping their community members safe from spammers, scammers, and trolls.
- Guiding productive and healthy conversations in the group.
- Creating a warm, welcoming environment for new members.
- Keeping the community up-to-date and informed with the latest news, updates, and resources from the project/business.
- Answering questions and responding to inquiries from the community members
- Setting the culture and tone of the group by punishing bad behavior, and rewarding good behavior.
(You can learn more the evolving role of crypto community management in the free e-book, “The 7 Pillars of Crypto Community Management”)
While Telegram provides a solid mobile chat experience and massive network effects, it falls short on offering Telegram Community Managers and Admins the tools they need to effectively manage these groups at scale.
And that’s where Chainfuel, a new Telegram management tool designed specifically for large-scale crytpo communities, comes in.
Chainfuel exploded onto the crypto industry in February this year, when they relaunched their Free Telegram Analytics & Anti-Spam Bot to the front page of Product Hunt.
Building off the success of their experiences running Telegram Community Management Services for several large-scale crypto communities, the Chainfuel team set out build a product that would automate and streamline all the common workflows of Telegram Community Managers, making their communities more safe, engaging, and informed.
And based on the growing list of top crypto projects using Chainfuel today – including NEO, Ontology, Quoine, mybit and more – it seems as though the product is resonating amongst some of the biggest names in the industry.
Today, Chainfuel offers two tiers of service: Chainfuel Free and Chainfuel PRO
Chainfuel Free is designed for small groups, hobbyists, and early stage startups just getting started on Telegram and offers users free Telegram Analytics, Spam Blocking, and a lightweight CRM tool.
Analytics
For any business managing their community on Telegram, it’s important to track KPIs and metrics of the community, so you can gauge the performance of your marketing, PR, and community management efforts.
While Telegram doesn’t offer any such analytics natively, Telegram Admins can now access such insights in the Chainfuel Analytics dashboard.
With Chainfuel’s Analytics offering, community managers can see:
Total Members
New Members (over any time period)
Churned Members (over any time period)
Number Of Messages (over any time period)
Daily active users
Average daily messages
As well as charts showing:
Group size over time
Messages & activity over time
With these data at their fingertips, Chainfuel’s customers are able to make data-driven decisions around their community and marketing strategies.
One major limitation we found in Chainfuel’s analytics offering is that it couldn’t show us historical data from our group – it can only show stats starting from the time we install Chainfuel.
While disappointing, Matt Nguyen, one of the co-founders of Chainfuel, explained that this was due to limitations of the Telegram Bot API that they use to access group data, so it’s understable.
Still, we wish there was an easy way to see past data, so with that limitation we give Chainfuel 4/5 stars on Analytics.
Spam Blocking
As anyone who’s been in any high-profile crypto Telegram Group can attest, spam is one of the biggest factors affecting Telegram communities today, as as such, fighting spam is one of the top priorities of crypto community managers today.
To help Telegram Admins fight spam, Chainfuel offers a long list of configuration settings which Admins can adjust according to the unique needs of their project.
Chainfuel’s Anti-Spam features include:
- General Settings = Turn on/off Join and Leave messages
- New Member Restrictions = set a time period during which new group members are restricted from posting different kinds of messages.
- Global Message Restrictions = prohibit different kinds of messages outright.
- Blacklists/Whitelists = Banning different offensive language other blacklist words, and whitelisting bots.
In addition to these configuration settings, Chainfuel’s employs a proprietary anti-spam machine-learning algorithm that is constantly being updated based on the latest techniques spammers are employing on Telegram.
Every post that’s made in a Chainfuel community gets analyzed for likeness to known spam techniques, and if a significant match is determined, the post is flagged as spam and deleted.
While we didn’t get a chance to really stress-test Chainfuel’s anti-spam features at scale (since our test Telegram group didn’t really get attacked by spammers), we spoke with a number of Chainfuel’s Anti-Spam users who have said that Chainfuel has been extremely helpful eliminating spam.
The configuration settings seem to a be a hit – giving Admins the flexibility to configure their moderation levels to fit their needs, but we’ve heard that Chainfuel has room to improve on their anti-spam machine learning algorithm – some harder-to-identify spam techniques still make their way into groups at times, so Telegram Admins will still have to vigilant, even while Chainfuel seems to be handling most of the lower-level spam techniques effectively.
For this, we give Chainfuel a 4.5/5 on Anti-Spam.
CRM/People Insights
Last but not least, Chainfuel offers Telegram Admins a novel new feature in the space: a lightweight CRM for their Telegram Community.
Telegram Admins often have to find and search for community members and perform certain actions to them.
While Telegram’s native iOS app does offer a simple search function for community members, it doesn’t offer anything more in the way of seeing each person’s activity, engagement levels, or anything beyond simple admin actions.
In playing around with this on our test group and talking with other Chainfuel users – there’s an understandable amount of excitement about the new possibilities here.
With Chainfuel’s CRM, for the first time ever, Telegram Admins have the ability to track stats and engagement numbers on individual Telegram community members.
We were able to see past messages, join/leave dates, and # messages.
Further, we were thrilled to find a feature that allowed us to flag certain members, so we could get notified when they engaged in the group – a really handy feature for keeping our eyes on particular persons of note in our community (anything from whales, to influencers, to just BFFs we want to keep tabs on).
Further, Matt Nguyen, Co-Founder of Chainfuel, explained, “There’s a lot more to come in our CRM feature. We’ll be introducing tagging and advanced searching, which will let you create segments of your user base that you can perform different actions on, and polls & surveys that will record responses to individual user profiles so you can filter by certain answers too.”
Because of the powerful opportunities with Telegram CRM and the fact that we haven’t seen similar offerings on the market to date, we give Chainfuel a 5/5 on CRM (and we’re excited to see where it goes.).
Chainfuel PRO
Chainfuel’s Free offering is geared towards smaller projects, hobbyists, and early stage startups just getting going on Telegram, and is 100% free for life, without limitations on group size or usage.
For established projects running Telegram groups at scale, Chainfuel’s PRO offer offers even more power features that large-scale groups demand, including more advanced anti-spam, analytics, and CRM tools, as well as some things not offered in free:
- Engagement Tools
- Welcome Messages
- Scheduled Messages
- RSS Integration
- Polls
- Surveys
- Custom Branded Bots
- 1:1 DMs
- The Chainfuel team is currently offering 50% Chainfuel PRO annual plans in a limited time presale.
Of note – Chainfuel recently integrated the Kyber Payments Widget to accept crypto payments via any ERC20 token in the Kyber network.
You can learn more about the presale at https://app.chainfuel.com/presale, or contact the team in the Chainfuel Telegram Community.
Conclusion
With the Telegram’s recent $1.8B token sale, and the pending Telegram Blockchain project around the corner, the future is bright for the Telegram ecosystem.
And as Telegram grows, the need for group management, analytics, anti-spam, and insight tools will only grow along with it.
For crypto projects managing large communities on Telegram, the job is tough, but Telegram bots and automation tools can help immensely.
For that, we were pleased with the results Chainfuel delivered in our testing, and look forward to seeing what the company has in store for the future.
Learn more and get started with Chainfuel for free at https://www.chainfuel.com
This review is rehosted from Use The Bitcoin.