Telegram channels review

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 07:45:04 +0100

Opinion on Telegram channels from the marketing point of view, and comparison with Facebook pages in numbers

Typically, Facebook pages occupy the primary slot among social networks for public figures and brands, gathering all news as a central hub. I’ve been an active Facebook user since 2011, but the more I use it, the less I like it.

As a DJ and music producer, I’m always looking for new ways of improving communication with the audience so followers can get my latest releases, tours, blogs, and other news. This search led me to Telegram channels, and today I’d like to share what I’ve learned about it.

What is Telegram

If you haven’t heard anything about Telegram yet, let’s start off with a quick 101:

It’s a fast and free messaging app founded in 2013.
It has mobile and desktop clients and cloud-based seamless sync between them.
It’s ad-free and will remain forever free according to founders.
It has a lot of powerful features like bots, secret chats, groups, channels, and more.
By February 2016 (a year ago), it has 100,000,000 monthly active users and 350,000 new users sign up each day, delivering 15 billion messages daily.

I’ve been using Telegram as a messenger for quite some time now, but started my own channel just about a month ago.

Telegram me

What is a channel

Channels are a tool for broadcasting public messages to large audiences, similar to what you do on Twitter. A sort of blog within the messaging app.

A channel has as a public username so you can search it within the app or access via browser by the direct link, like telegram.me/dsokolovskiy_channel.

Basically, it looks like just one of the chats in the app. You can share text messages, images, links, and even audio and video playbacks using a built-in player.

By default, when you share a post, your followers will see a push notification. You can also send “silent” messages by clicking on the ring icon, this way they won’t receive notifications but rather just see an unread counter of your channel in the chats list, this is a sort of “gentle” notification. And since all broadcasts are organized by chats, you don’t need to compete for the users’ attention in their newsfeed using cat pictures — they will see your messages when they want to.

Here’s how a channel looks in the desktop app

One noticeable difference between Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media is a lack of interaction. There is literally no way people can “like” or comment on your posts, at least for now. The only thing that makes you sure you’re not writing into the empty void is the views counter on the right side of each of your post.

Is it a good thing? Let’s see.

My experience with channels in numbers

I have a very humble experience with Telegram channels as I’ve been using it only a month now, but here is what I’ve learned so far: per follower, Telegram posts reach a much larger audience than in any other social media.

I think since it’s a messaging app, people treat channels like one-on-one conversations and hence trust the authors. For example, if on Facebook people can “Like” your page just to show some support, here on Telegram people follow channels because they really want to read them.

Just to give some numbers to compare with, let’s take a look at my Facebook page which has about 14700 followers.

On Facebook, organic posts reach and engagement is quite suck

You’ll instantly notice these two quite nicely performed posts with 10k and 13k audience reach and probably think “huh, not bad!”. Well, the truth is such spikes happen very rarely, and besides, we know that Facebook artificially gives your native videos higher priority in the users’ newsfeed in order to compete with YouTube videos.

“Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video” by Hank Green

If you look at the other posts, they typically reach in between 1–3k, let’s count it as 2k on average. That is only about 13% of the total amount of followers.

Just think about it a for a moment: you spend a huge amount of time (and sometimes money, too) on getting a solid fanbase on Facebook, but once it’s time to actually speak to your audience — let’s say, you’re announcing a new album or a gig — only 13% on your followers will see your important announcement.

Now compare this to what I’ve experienced on Telegram:

Stats	Facebook page 14 700 followers	Telegram channel 74 followers
Average post reach	2k, or 13,6%	205, or 277%
Top-performed post reach	13k, or 88%	2k, or 2500%

Yes, that’s it. Having only 74 followers on the channel so far, my posts typically reach as twice as the audience I have. And my top-performed post so far viewed by more than 2000 people (once the counter reaches thousands, Telegram only shows short “2k” without specifics). Imagine if I’d had 14700 followers here like my Facebook page has :-)

How is that? Well, It seems that having no ability to “like” or comment motivates people to share your posts — this function is called forwarding here. And people actually do forward posts — to their friends, groups, and other public channels.

Even those posts which underperform still reach out to about 50~80% of your followers, which is equal to the most top-performed posts on Facebook.

Such a broad audience reach isn’t unique to my channel. For example, take a look at the Telegram’s own news channel: they have 78k followers while their typical post reaches about 250–400 thousand people. That’s huge.

Telegram News channel’s post reach is ×4-5 more people than the number of followers they have

Conclusion

Frankly, I have no idea what Telegram will be like in a few years. I also have no idea where to get the audience, I’m not even sure how most of these 74 followers I currently have found me in the first place.

What I know, though, is that Telegram is certainly worth trying.

On cover image: futuristic art from Telegram.org. All numbers are taken from the moment of December, 15.

***

Update on January 27, 2017

Last month I’ve been using Amplifr for social media analytics, and turns out I have 20% of the social traffic coming from Telegram. But taking into account that currently, my Telegram channel has 10—100 times fewer followers than my other social accounts, it actually means that Telegram has the highest click-rate per follower among all social networking services.

Social network traffic distribution on my website, data from Google Analytics on January 27, 2017

Instant messengers vs. email for business communication

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 10:31:33 +0100

What’s the best way to reach out to some artists to ask for a collab or a remix? Should I seek out their private accounts to get a more personal talk or you’d suggest using official contact via their managers etc?

Craig Peterson

Craig, I’d like to discuss the topic of “messengers vs. email” in general, regardless whether you want to reach out some artist to speak about remixing, or send a promo to a DJ, or send a demo to a record label. And obviously I can’t speak for everyone, so I’ll tell you about myself.

Every time someone sends me a private message on Facebook, SoundCloud, HearThis, Google+, Twitter, Skype, VK, or Linkedin, one of the two things happens. Either I don’t see this at all because the service hides it from me, or I don’t have time to reply right now, as a result making this message lost forever.

That’s the general problem of all instant messengers. They demand your attention here and now, and you never know for sure how long this chat will take especially when you see a message with nothing but a “Hi, how are you?”. I do chat on Facebook and Telegram occasionally, though, it’s rather an exception for very few persons.

Telegram me

Also keep in mind that having all important conversation on Facebook or any other website is very risky. If your account gets stolen or blocked, you’ll lose access to all of your chats as well. If the person with whom you had a conversation with decided to remove his account, you’ll lose that chat as well (that happened to me once). That is why I have a principle: don’t rely on social networks.

A website vs. Facebook for musicians

Email is different.

I can read a message and mark it as unread to reply back later without getting “read” status by the person on the other side, making him think I’ve read it and ignored.

I can write a draft while offline and it’ll be sent automatically as soon as I get the internet. I can set a reminder to reply to that particular email using third-party apps like Wunderlist or Apple’s built-in Reminders. I can add inline pictures in the message body, and add a hidden recipient in BCC if needed.

And at last but not least, I can flag, label, and organize messages by folders wherever I like. When you get a hundred incoming messages per day, email is the only realistic way of keeping them organized. All of these things make email a clear winner for business communication. Remember, time is the most valuable resource.

So next time when you would like to send me a demo or just say hi, please drop me an email, I read every single one.

Get in touch

On cover image: a slightly exaggerated example of a typical conversation over instant messengers.