Making self-managed Telegram channel without a single line of code… And failing

Proving that automated content generation is not the best way to obtain your loyal audience

As a disclaimer to this post I should say that I do believe in the world where the creative and intellectual labor can be automated and this bright times are not so far from our reality. Automation became a trend of the 2000’s and strongly hit minds of dozens of great engineers all over the world. For now it just knocks out the doors of every business and life niche where it goes.

You’ve probably heard about the Lawyer bot that saved a huge bunch of money and nerves to 25000 appealers. And when you read an articles like this, you think “Hey, if that kiddo could make a bot to substitute the most highly paid profession and trick those municipal guys why can’t I do the same?”

— “Cause you don’t know how to write f**king code”, answers your inner voice. But than you making a deep breath, relaxing for a while and realizing that you’re in 2017 where the programmable robots are available even to a 6-years old children.

That’s how I manage to solve all engineering issues

“Well, at least we can give it a try”, you say. And spending all day googling about the approaches of the automated social channels administration without digging into IDE and drinking another 3 to 5 extra cappuccinos and spamming your browser’s history with another 7485 StackOverflow pages.

Few reasons why I choose Telegram

• First of all, it’s trendy. Unless it’s not about Snapchat or Instagram stories, but let’s face the truth: I’m a really crappy photographer and I don’t want to be busted stealing someone other’s photos to check if the hypothesis works.
• I don’t really get the concept of using messengers as a content distribution channels. For me it’s very similar to the situation when you’re chilling with your closest friends somewhere in the pub or having an intimate dinner with your girlfriend and all of a sudden your TV turns on and you’re forced to listen about how many people had sex in the space(actually, zero). So I should figure out the magic behind the scenes.
• Last but not the least: Lots of services for automation provide an acceptable experience with Telegram API(at least I thought so).

So the first thing to do was to decide about the topics for channels posts. It took about 5 mins to choose the Technologies & Innovations.
Why?
Because there are 2 channels in my friends feed that grown like about a 200% per month writing about the latest Tweets from Musk and Yahoo’s struggle with Marissa Mayer.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
– Stewart Brand

So it’s time to define the approach for content generation. Being smart enough you’ve noticed that there are “self managed” and “without single line of code” thesis in this article’s title, so in a simple words it turns in “Just take your content somewhere else, wrap it with your channel’s identity and post it”.

Aaaaand the finalists are:

• Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Marissa Mayer, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Paul Graham and Mashable
• Tech&Startups and Innovations subreddits
• Apple, Google, Tesla and SpaceX Youtube channels
• Messages about some random and unknown apps become free in App Store/Play Market
• My personal Twitter to improve the entropy rate of a channel :)

Being lazy as hell and trying to get rich or die doing the tries I’ve decided to stop on IFTTT which simply stands for the If-This-Than-That, as a perfect metaphor for my relationships with programming.

This is a simple yet effective service which aggregates different services API and allows i-wanna-be-geeks to make a simple automation routine with just a few clicks.

So I just clicked for 2 hours and now I’m ready to go live with my IT Sketches channel! hoooray!

Behind the scenes after couple of hours live

Positives:

• I’ve got my first seven subscribers(my girlfriend, IFTTT bot and other 5 invited friends who adore me too much to refuse invitation)
• It really works. * That bot really sent the tweets and articles straight to my Telegram channel adding the stylish call-to-action for the subscription.
• Till the end of the day my average view rate for posts reached almost 100% and the views exceeded the amount of subscribers(and it means that I’m damn good in social media optimization)
• I’ve made my own channel and hell didn’t write a single line of code

My “bot’s evening”: long story short

Negatives

• No one really gives a s**it about auto-generated content from Twitter…
• … and YouTube captions which are seem to be not uploading into a Telegram channel…
• … and especially about the apps you’ll never use and download on your phone.
• * It really works unless it’s the day of the Trump’s signing the anti-immigrant papers and every single Twitter member(and of course the trend setter in IT and tech-world) wants to put his own quarter into discussion of how anti-humanistic is it.

A little less conversation, little more Trump’s critics

And a bit more of Trump’s critics

• After the next 2 days the secret(and a killer feature of my channel by coincidence) of posting without any line of code was cracked by those who noticed the IFTTT in-built shortener links. And my subscribers reduced to 5.
• Never. Never let the tweets from Elon Musk’s Q&A session to be aggregated by your channel. Just remember. Never make a such mistake I’ve made.

Conclusions

So it’s time to drop a handful of wisdom and experience I’ve earned during my 3-weeks experiment:

• The working concept of the Telegram channel is a “Best Friend” approach meaning that the news posted are generously flavored with a subjectively described thought and opinion of channel owner. This way perfectly fits with statistics that show user’s behaviour patterns. We basically use messengers for staying in touch and sharing some weirdo URLs with your closest friends. For everyone else we used to use Facebook or texts. Or don’t speak with them at all.
• Another working concept of the Telegram channel is a “Closer to the celeb”. Being an opinion leader you can just pick and post some of your private(or public?) life details which are cannot be revealed on any other social media content distribution channel.
• You can use the automated content aggregation for sure, but not for the public channel but for gathering all the interesting and hot topics in your DM with bot(which is possible using IFTTT), add a laconic intro and then send it as a post to your channel.
• Bots technology’s really cool and useful but it’s still lots of blank spaces in it talking about automated content distribution.

And if you know any fine public channels that mastered the content distribution automation magic, share in comments. You’ll help me to turn my next procrastination in the take 2 of this experiment.

Images: https://xkcd.com/