Since the Government is using Telegram, and Telegram is becoming a tool for receiving daily information, let’s talk about how you can have your own channel on that platform.

Most importantly, opening a Telegram channel takes half a minute. You simply need to have it, open the New Channel section, decide the name of the channel and the link. It’s up to your imagination and creativity to create an interesting but understandable name and choose a link which will be your channel’s business card. The channel will have a link that looks like t.me/yourname, as well as will show up in the search engine with @yourname.

In order to run a channel, you ought to have Telegram on both your phone and your computer.

In this form, the channel is already ready for use. However you can use a few important tools, which will allow you to make your posts more exciting.

First, let’s take into consideration that you can’t send large messages in Telegram. Many use own blog, where they place the text, and then send the link to the Telegram channel. But Telegram has an additional tool called Telegraph for that purpose. Here you can create normal texts, include photos and videos, and link it to Telegram.

An important thing to note, Telegraph posts are anonymous, your identity is not disclosed. Furthermore, the Telegram channel is also anonymous, your identity is not disclosed, people looking from the outside will not know who is running the channel. The channel, by the way, can have more than one admin, you simply need to add them in the channel’s settings section.

The simplicity of Telegram also has its negative sides, since many want to have more saturated texts, which for example, include underlined words, active links hence inside the texts etc. Or there is a desire to create polls, after all receive likes for great posts.

Such actions have solutions. For example, you can create your own bot, that is, a Telegram bot,which can help you with other issues. Here the options are many, let me bring an example.

We go to a special bot, which allows you to create your own bot: @BotFather. (To find bots you simply need search for it in the Telegram Search Engine).

We write a command to create our bot. We make this newbie on of our page’s admins.

Then you just need to try different possibilities. For example, we visit another bot, @ControllerBot. This is a bot which you attach to your bot. Then your posts can be edited here and sent to your channel. You can create draft posts and decide when to publish them.

Another bot, @VoteBot allows you to create a poll. @markdownbot lets you write html-rich texts. In fact, there are many interesting bos. You simply need to continuously search for and find new types of bots and possibilities. But well, you shouldn’t exploit the opportunities of bots. Let’s not forget that the important thing is the content.

Samvel Martirosyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.