With a recent average annual growth of around 40% and a monthly active user base of over 500 million, Telegram is quickly gaining popularity as the place to stay connected and chat online.
Why is Telegram so popular? For one, the app is dedicated to ensuring the privacy of its users. Plus, you can create bots on Telegram. These bots can serve various functions, including subscription management.
These features make Telegram a great platform for entrepreneurs. There are millions of channels on the messaging app, and many of these are paid Telegram channels. Whop easily integrates with Telegram for the creation of paid private communities on the app.
In this article, we will recap what Telegram is and how it can be used to create communities, before unpacking how you can make and use bots in Telegram. If you already have a community and are looking for a subscription management system including a powerful bot, sign up with Whop here today. Otherwise, keep reading to discover more about this prominent messaging app.
What is Telegram? ✉️
While it’s far behind the global reach of conglomerates like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, Telegram has features that allow it to stand its ground as one of the leading internet messaging platforms today.
Launched in 2013 by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, Telegram is notable for its dedication to privacy. In the early days, this decision caused its founders to eventually leave their homeland of Russia to continue building the company, as Telegram was banned there and in other regions due to their refusal to hand over encryption keys to authorities.
Today, it is complete with privacy features such as end-to-end encryption (meaning that only the participating users can view the messages) of messages and compatibility across various devices and operating systems thanks to its use of the cloud for storage.
Telegram also has a highly customizable interface for both the casual user who can choose a variety of backgrounds, colors, and stickers. Plus, the serious developer can use its API which is complete with webhooks that offer a variety of functionality including the integration of bots.
Telegram Communities 👥
Because of its dedication to privacy and a whopping maximum group size of 200,000 as of 2023, Telegram has attracted a large number of communities, notably in crypto and other business realms. Let's take a closer look at creating a community on Telegram.
Creating a Telegram community
In addition to one-on-one chatting, Telegram makes it easy to reach an audience. You can do this by creating a channel, which is more for broadcasting messages without much interaction or creating a group where you can facilitate and encourage community interaction.
To make a community on Telegram, simply create a group with a name in mind and you will be able to send an invite link to anyone that you would like to join. You can read more about how to create a Telegram channel here.
Benefits of creating a community on Telegram
By choosing Telegram as your place to make a community, you will reap a number of benefits that include:
- Telegram historically attracts a tech or business-inclined crowd, so there will be a natural camaraderie for many who are loyal users
- Ability to segment the groups into topic threads, which makes for easy organization
- Easily grant and rescind access to messaging or to the group entirely for those who might violate group rules
- Ability to create and use bots to chat and manage group functions including subscriptions
Bots in Telegram 🤖
While it is possible to create and manage a Telegram Group without using any bots, you might as well be using another messaging platform if you’re not taking advantage of the resources and functionality that Telegram provides.
One of the main capabilities that takes advantage of Telegram’s API and Webhooks is the ability to create a bot. This bot will join as a user of your group and act as a virtual assistant that can assume multiple roles.
Telegram bots can take on basically as many forms as a builder can dream up within the boundaries of a coding language (bots on the platform can be built with over a dozen coding languages, including Go, Rust, Java and Python), so they can end up as games, personal assistants, or file fetchers and converters.
How to Make a Bot in Telegram
To get started building a Telegram bot, you need to use a coding language that allows for the sending of POST requests, so you can choose anything from Python to PHP and in between.
If you want to see examples of bot API libraries that serve various functions in more than a dozen coding languages, you can find a good variety of samples here.
Once you’ve settled on an idea, you will go through a whole testing and development cycle. This should typically be faster than building something entirely from scratch thanks to thorough documentation and an actively engaged community of Telegram bot creators.
You can also utilize pre-made bots rather than building one yourself, which is especially helpful if you are a business owner running a paid Telegram group.
Using Bots in Telegram Groups
Since Telegram bots can serve many useful functions, the best groups on the platform, especially those that are paid and private, include bots to give the greatest benefit to both the group member and owner.
Here are some general categories of bots that are used by Telegram Groups:
Chatbots
One of the most popular and useful types of bots that will show up in a Telegram group is a chatbot.
Telegram bots can be programmed to understand and answer the user's messages as calls so that it will reply accordingly.
You can take a curated dataset or even a large language model like ChatGPT and use it as the core “brain” or logic for your Telegram chatbot.
By doing this, you will have a bot that can act as customer service and support or to take care of any FAQs, which will save you quite a bit of maintenance as a group owner.
To start a conversation with a Telegram chatbot, a user can simply input a predetermined command and from there they can ask questions for which they will receive answers within the bot’s capability.
Event-Based Bots
A Telegram bot can also respond to events that happen outside of any user command input, simply by fetching outside data that it is connected to.
For example, in a crypto coin group, whenever a purchase is posted, a Telegram Buy Bot can push the notification of it to the community whenever the event happens.
User commands can also be used to check in on data outside of automatic events, to follow up on the example that is quite common in crypto telegram communities, a “/price” command can trigger a Telegram Bot to fetch and display the real-time price of a coin.
Subscription Bots
Perhaps one of the most important bots to preserve your bottom line if you’re the owner of a group is a subscription bot.
However, unlike other bots which might have simple or publicly documented open-source solutions, a Telegram subscription bot can create difficulties as it has many variables, including payment gateways, user access timeframes, and license key management.
If you want a solution that is incredibly powerful and fully capable of running a Telegram subscription with features like auto-adding and auto-removing of users, chatting, and more, be sure to check out the Whop Telegram Bot. In conjunction with Whop’s dashboard and global payment management system, you will have an all-in-one solution for all of your software subscription needs.
Creating a Telegram Subscription Bot with Whop 💡
Bots that respond to user commands or simple outside events such as a publicly posted purchase are fairly straightforward when it comes to building them.
However, when you need to monitor a private subscription, things get complicated as there are more calls that must be made between various platforms, so with more events, webhooks and APIs interacting together, things can get messy and complicated.
Thankfully, Whop provides an easy-to-use all-in-one solution with a powerful and thorough dashboard that allows you to view and manage subscriptions that are paid through a globally accepted payment gateway.
This dashboard is easily integrated with its very own Telegram Bot which you can use to easily manage member access with authentication through license keys.
Here is a basic guide that shows how quick and easy it is to set up the Whop Bot on your Telegram channel:
Step 1: Add the Whop Telegram Bot to your channel
Sign up as a seller on Whop and select Telegram as your product type.
Step 2: Verify your Telegram Channel and Whop Company
You will be prompted to generate a code which you will copy and paste into your Telegram channel to verify.
Step 3: Make your Telegram Channel’s subscription live on Whop’s marketplace
That’s it! You can now sell your subscription and easily manage it within your Whop dashboard.
👉For a full guide on setting up your Telegram group with Whop, check our documentation here.
👉 Now that you see how quick and easy it is to start a private subscription on Telegram with Whop, start selling with us today. Whop is your go-to solution for managing and selling any recurring subscription with ease!
FAQs
Is Telegram totally secure and private?
Telegram started with a religious dedication to privacy, so much so that the founders left their home country because the app was banned there due to compliance reasons around data publicity. A decade later, Telegram has changed, so there is some controversy surrounding this topic as it is no longer end-to-end encrypted by default. However, it can be configured to be truly private with its secret chat feature which also has a disappearing function.
What can I sell in a Telegram group?
If you’re selling any form of business advice, you probably have a viable idea for a Telegram group. Examples of group topics include trading traditional or crypto markets, ecommerce, and life hacks. You can see all the types of groups on our marketplace here.
How can I market my Telegram channel?
Effective marketing of your Telegram channel is the most important part of establishing the initial and ongoing traction to keep you incentivized by continuing to offer the services that your community provides.
In addition to potentially using ads to acquire paying users, you can and should take advantage of the free organic reach that platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have. Simply provide free advice on a consistent basis that gives enough value to the viewers but leaves them wanting more, i.e., your paid group.
Are there alternatives to Telegram groups for a subscription-based community?
An attractive alternative to Telegram is a paid Discord community, which is perhaps more powerful when it comes to organizing and managing a private community. In addition to its own bots, arguably has a better channel and thread organization than Telegram. Whop supports Discord subscription management as well, so if you run a group on there, you can sign up to sell on our marketplace here.
