Building a Thriving Telegram Community: How to Increase Telegram Group Members for Business and Brand Growth

Newsletters, Telegram Ads, auto-funnels, chatbots – all of these can be used by a business to advertise and sell its product. The forms of a company’s messenger presence are varied and functional. Advertising in Messenger has not yet had time to bore the audience, and the audience itself is solvent and mature. That’s why businesses should buy Telegram members or get it for free as soon as possible.

How a Channel Differs from a Group

A Telegram channel is a community where content is published for subscribers. It is created to transmit data from one source (a certain company) to a wide range of subscribers (its audience).

In some ways, it resembles a social network public: you can subscribe to it, and then regularly read thematic publications. It is a kind of analog of a blog. The right to publish content belongs only to the administrator.

Hence, the main feature of channels is that their subscribers cannot communicate with each other by default. If the administrator allows discussion of a post, users can comment on their point of view.

Other subscribers cannot be viewed; only the total number of subscribers can be seen in the public domain. This guarantees the privacy of each participant since no one will be able to determine that he is present in the community. Notifications about new subscriptions do not come here.

The number of participants in this format is not limited (the maximum threshold in the group – up to 200,000 subscribers). Another plus for the public – is a counter of views. This information allows you to make objective conclusions about subscribers’ current activity and individual publications’ success.

Channels in Telegram are public and private. Anyone can join a public one, while a private one can be joined only by link-invitation. Most businesses use the first option. It helps to interest the maximum number of potential customers, warm up a wide audience, and increase sales.

But private channels in e-commerce are also used. Both types of channels fulfill different goals:

• Realizing a specific business strategy.
• Rising awareness of the company and product.
• Building a loyal audience.
• Increasing brand awareness, creating a positive image.
• Advertising, active promotion of goods.
• Increasing profits, etc.

The most successful are unique channels with useful, interesting content. They get a daily, active growth of subscribers. Expertise in the topic is very important here.

You can use Messenger in simple ways or use non-standard approaches. It all depends on your financial capabilities and time resources.

Here are the options:

1. Send out notifications about various events and news of the company. For example, about the beginning of some action, receipt of a new line of goods.
2. Make a thematic newsletter with regular posts on certain topics related to the business’s niche. The format is similar to a classic blog, only conducted in Telegram.
3. Create an advertising channel with announcements and reviews of products from the company’s assortment.
4. Purchase advertising in other channels to attract new audiences.
5. Develop your own sets of stickers in the corporate style of the store. This is an effective image move that works well for long-term promotion.
6. Connect a chatbot. The tasks of an automated tool can be different: answers to frequent questions, help with product selection, technical support, and so on.

How to Create a Group

1. Go to the section with chats and click the icon in the upper right corner. Then select “Create Group”.
2. From the contacts list, select those you want to add to the group, and click “Next” → “Create”. By default, the messenger will create a private, closed group. To invite people to the group not on your contact list, you can send them an invitation link and share it on social networks and messengers. To do this, click on the group name → Edit → Invitation Links. Click on the link to copy it, or click “Share” to send it to the right person.
3. Add a description and image of the group. To do this, click on the group’s name and click “Edit”. In the description field, specify the group’s topic, and to add an image from your smartphone gallery, click “New photo or video”.
4. Connect reactions. To do this, tap on the group name → “Edit” → “Reactions”. Select the reactions you want to add and enable them. Now, group members can mark messages with these reactions. Done!

Design of the Group and Posts

The first thing that catches your eye when viewing a group is the logo and name. This is where you should start creating a group for your business. In most cases, groups are named like the company. You can experiment here: remember, people read content created by the user, not the company. Therefore, you can and should develop a personal brand.

All posts should be designed in the same style. Valuable material is good, but it is even better if the style is consistent. We recommend that you stick to it:

• The same colors are used for infographics and diagrams.
• The same filters for photos.
• A single idea and topic of posts (if a group about bodybuilding has posts about table tennis, it could be better. Remember that your audience is not interested in tennis: they like to work out in the gym and gain muscle mass).
• A single style of writing posts (some subscribers appreciate not only the informative content of posts but also the presentation of the material).

Automate Business Processes

With the help of Telegram, you can automate some business processes – for example, receiving and processing applications, communication with customers, and technical support.

Telegram uses bots to automate business processes – chatbots that respond to user requests and automatically provide the necessary information. Automate communication with customers – for example, a customer asks about the company’s products, and the chatbot will provide the necessary information to the customer. Let’s go straight to an example.

The goal of a real estate agency bot is to bring a client to the site. The bot asks the client in which city he is looking for an apartment, how many rooms it should have and how much money he expects. For each question, the bot offers answer options and, based on the collected information, sends the client a selection of suitable apartments on the agency’s website.

This is a simplified scenario; there may be more questions and answer options. The main thing is for the bot to offer specific solutions to the client and not just be an intermediary between the company and the client.

What Tools Does TG Have for Companies?

If you’ve previously customized advertising in messengers, you’ve probably gotten different results. Let’s look at all the important Telegram tools for businesses to maximize the effect of promotion within the messenger. Telegram has a lot of interesting things in terms of tools.

Stickers

The messenger allows you to create your stickers. And it is especially valuable for business. After all, the company can remind people about its brand, effectively promote the product, and do it in the most fun, funny form. You can create a sticker pack with your logo or other element of corporate identity.

Channels and Groups

We’ve already talked about them. The main thing is that channels allow businesses to target their messages directly to an audience of subscribers without intermediaries and other complexities. Groups can help establish communication between anyone in the business. They can be used for internal communication, brainstorming, teamwork, and file sharing.

Voice Chats

Of all the tools discussed, voice chats have the greatest business potential. Judge for yourself: direct conversations, testing, conducting webinars, QA sessions, interactive content. And this is just a small part of where voice chats can be utilized.

Payments within Messenger

The client doesn’t have to go to a social network or website and open the payment page. It is enough to make a couple of taps on the phone, and the product is paid for. Payment inside Telegram is an ideal option for e-commerce or commodity business companies.

Newsletters

TG has mailing lists because it is a messenger. It would help if you created a channel beforehand. The above method (via channel) is the best way to show any promotional posts to all subscribers. Users can subscribe to receive messages from the company.

There are other ways to send mailing lists – “black”, but they belong to spam. For example, you can order the sending of mailings through a third-party service. Usually, such mailings go directly to subscribers of popular channels of certain topics. The recipient of the mailing is just an email from an unknown user. Trust in such messages – will not be. So, it is better to choose the first method.

Important: to make the mailing list functional or interactive, you must use a chatbot, for example, for regular order status updates.

Here are step-by-step instructions on how to make a newsletter in TG:

1. Use the Telegram API to create a bot. Purpose: accept subscriptions and automatically send newsletters. By the way, there are many ready-made framework solutions.
2. Create separate channels by purpose (customer support, assortment updates, promotions, product news). In other words, divide your audience into groups and channels.
3. Use advanced privacy settings when you need to send targeted newsletters. Here are examples of scenarios: limit requests to join, limit visibility in public member lists;
4. Integrate Telegram with the mailing platform you use. Such services include BotKits, Unisender, TextBack, and Client Hunter.

Important: be sure to follow the rules of Telegram. Do not spam those who are not subscribed to the newsletter. Be sure to add an easy unsubscribe method.

Pros of Telegram for Business

Far from just the huge and ever-increasing audience of the messenger makes it a desirable tool for companies. There are other reasons as well.

• Large group chats and channels. Unlike other messengers, Telegram is more “massive” in its functionality. For example, the number of participants in the same chats can be up to 200 thousand users. Communication via messenger with clients, employees, investors, and partners is convenient even for very large companies with thousands of contacts.
• Secure data transfer. Messenger pays great attention to the safety of user data. This point is especially relevant for businesses because data leaks are dangerous for reputation.
• Synchronization between devices. It’s like with a Google account. Messenger can be used on any device. For businesses, this is an opportunity to improve the customer’s user experience and additional convenience for the company’s employees.
• Customizable Bots. The plus side of Telegram is the availability of an API. This opens up many opportunities for businesses to create chatbots that can perform routine operations.
• For example, you can collect applications, accept payments, advise customers, distribute content, and more. By the way, the bot can also be integrated with third-party tools and thus provide an intuitive user experience (seamless customer journey).
• Media content support. These include images, animations, videos, audio, and documents. Businesses can share content with customers more conveniently and familiarly rather than vice versa.

Cons

Now, about the disadvantages of Telegram for business. We can distinguish 3 main minuses.

• Limited advertising opportunities. Unlike other messengers and social networks, Telegram initially did not have anadvertising platform. Now, this functionality is only being developed and still needs to be improved.
• Quality of support. Telegram does not give full support to advertisers.
• Weak integrations. Telegram has an API for creating bots, but few third-party integrations exist. And they are especially important when working with advertising platforms and marketing services. After all, setting up custom integrations manually and writing scripts for them from scratch is too complicated and expensive, especially for small companies.

Conclusion

Telegram group is an effective platform for realizing important business tasks. With its help, you can increase customer loyalty, make your brand recognizable, and increase sales. Messenger has all the tools for customization, promotion, and publication management. To attract more attention to your group, create exclusive content for it and lead it in the author’s style. With the right approach, it will become a powerful additional source of traffic and sales.