Strong community or how to promote your project in Telegram

DateCoin CEO, Nikita Anufriev

Before attempting to use Telegram for project promotion it would be useful to answer a simple question: What do they have in common? ICO project and messenger. Is it just a fashion trend or a working tool?

For social networks ruling the world, only the laziest person keeps silence. That is, the audience of Facebook exceeds 1 billion users and for all social networks together it is several times more. However, the statistics indicates that the messengers tend to replace social networks, since the former share characteristics of several platforms.

What are the figures about Telegram? Just before the ICO its founder Pavel Durov has disclosed 170M active users to be signed up.The messenger audience primarily includes people aged from 25 to 50, that is the majority of economically active population.

Not surprisingly, thousands of companies are using this messenger for products and services promotion. Only diletant can ignore Telegram, when launching ICO project.

Nowadays, it can be for sure stated, that each project should have Telegram channel (to keep users updated with the latest news) or chat (for news and discussions).

There are just few CEOs and marketing agencies experienced in using Telegram. Thus, old-fashioned ads are widely used being not only inefficient, but even harmful.

For Telegram a bunch of time should be spent, thus it is often done by the company responsible for ICO-project promotion. How can you estimate its efficiency? The number of subscribers and their activity are the best indicators. To increase the number of subscribers is the key marketing goal. This job is, however, not always successful. Thus bots, spam newsletters (personal and general), juking and other unfair tricks are widely used.

1. Adding bots to chats. Neither harmful, nor useful. Will only increase the total number of subscribers being inactive. it looks very suspicious for the channel to have 10K subscribers with not more than 20 comments to each post.

2. Mass invitations. This promotional method is quite dangerous. Have you ever been woken up by your phone started beeping and discovered being added to some group in Telegram?Never? Lucky you are! Any user with username set can be added to the group (without asking permission) using ‘Add members’. The user is unable to deactivate this feature. This will most probably leave the group and complain resulting in unfavorable consequences.

3. Juking. Almost the same as bots. The only difference in users to be real, but paid. Those are not the targeted audience and will never become investors. Almost for sure, they are even not going to read the news. The result will be equivalent to 1.

4. Spam newsletter. Like previous one, doesn’t worse it. Sooner or later you will face to very angry user or mad channel administrator, both resulting in temporarily or permanent ban.

5. Ads in other groups. Pretty working strategy. However, keep in mind that the group owners created it for getting profit. they will be extremely unhappy to see somebody advertising for free.The admins of other groups will also be unhappy about somebody starting to advertise his ICO. The message will be deleted and the complaint will be filed resulting in ban and block.

I would to consider the last option in more details. That is, purchasing ads in channels may cause some problems and result it financial losses. I mostly mean… Unfortunately, this a general practice even for popular channels, aiming to increase the audience with bots or paid users. This policy finally results in price increase for ads posting.

In general, checking channel is quite easy. All you need to do is to monitor the ratio of subscribers and views. The typical value is 2:1 (1500 views for 300 subscribers).

Another frequently arising problem is a fraud from admins or those pretending to be admins.

The second case is easier, since it only requires to be more careful when picking the cheapest and the most interesting offers. That is very easy. All you need to do is to check the channel panel for the admin nickname and it with the one of the sales person. If those two do not match, don’t hesitate to contact admin and figure out whether the sales person is trustful and somehow related to the channel.

You can however face to somewhat more complicated problem, when paying to the channel admin that later disappears. We were unlucky to experience this kind of situation with one channel. The admin grabbed our money and stopped replying our messages and banned us. But we still considered it as a life experience.

These advices are essential if you have subscribers. There are two ways to attract them:

• Free. Free ads in Telegram channels published at third-party resources (official website, groups in social networks) or mutual PR.
• Paid. All the same, but for cash.

Ads price depends on the number of subscribers, views, time of being in top and newsfeed, format (single or multiple posts).

For the free option, the benefits (except price) are limited. The response time is usually very slow. Moreover, the followers can easily be absolutely not interested in your ICO. When using paid option, targeted ads can be adjusted. I think, there is no need to compare the efficiency of these two approaches. Anyway, telegram channel management requires permanent control and optimization.

Source http://www.coinfox.info/9048-strong-community-or-how-to-promote-your-project-in-telegram