Looking atthe channel from a company’s perspective, there are three fundamental characteristics:

• Complete anonymity of users: Telegram is for all effects a messaging service similar to WhatsApp, but with a coverage and data encryption system which, according to Durov, makes it invulnerable. When a new contact subscribes to a company’s Telegram channel, the company has no way of knowing the contact’s name, last name, or telephone number.

• Public domain API:This allows developers to implement services, add modes and options, and develop bots.

• Broadcast logic: In addition to secret groups and chats, Telegram lets you manage channels, i.e. special chats without any member limits. The fundamental characteristic here is one-way communication, one to many. Recipients cannot reply within the channels, but can only and exclusively view the content sent to them.

This last feature makes Telegram a perfect channel for companies and professionals who want to immediately update their customers on news, promotions, or events: a sort of mailing list with the characteristics of conversational marketing.

Brands also have technical support that exploits and expands the potential of Telegram with MailUp: it’s called Messaging Apps and is the channel that lets you connect a Telegram account to the MailUp platform, allowing you to manage the messaging app like a true digital marketing channel, for:

• Creating messages full of content
• Automating automatic campaign flows
• Sending with established schedules and frequencies
• Tracking openings and clicks in the message.

Until 30 September, Telegram is included in the price of Facebook Messenger.

In practice, you have two channels for the price of one!

Choose the Messaging Apps plan that’s right for you

Many brands are still quite unsure of what and how to communicate on Telegram. This is why we would like to explore Telegram today, to show you how to carry out marketing and communications using its logic.

Formal Security Analysis

The central result of our investigation, however, is that Telegram’s MTProto can provide a confidential and integrity-protected channel when the changes we suggested are adopted by the Telegram developers. As mentioned above, the Telegram developers communicated to us that they did adopt these changes. Telegram awarded a cash prize for this analysis to stimulate future analysis.

However, this result comes with significant caveats. Cryptographic protocols like MTProto are built from cryptographic building blocks such as hash functions, block ciphers and public-key encryption. In a formal security analysis, the security of the protocol is reduced to the security of its building blocks. This is no different to arguing that a car is road safe if its tires, brakes and indicator lights are fully functional. In the case of Telegram, the security requirements on the building blocks are unusual. Because of this, these requirements have not been studied in previous research. This is somewhat analogous to making assumptions about a car’s brakes that have not been lab-tested. Other cryptographic protocols such as TLS do not have to rely on these sort of special assumptions.

A further caveat of these findings is that we only studied three official Telegram clients and no third-party clients. However, some of these third-party clients have substantial user bases. Here, the brittleness of the MTProto protocol is a cause for concern if the developers of these third-party clients are likely to make mistakes in implementing the protocol in a way that avoids, e.g. the timing leaks mentioned above. Alternative design choices for MTProto would have made the task significantly easier for the developers.

Reasons why Telegram is the best way to advance your business

So, let’s discuss the main benefits of Telegram.

It’s free

Regardless of how many messages you send or receive per day or what purpose you use this messenger for (business, personal usage) – it’s completely free and has no limitations. You are able to send images, videos, text and voice messages at zero cost. Moreover, you can use all these to promote your mobile app development company, for example, and create a marketing plan.

Segmentation

In case you deal with the different group of customers, which is almost always true, the segmentation will save you some time on mail outs. Just sort your prospects in accordance with interest, region or age and Telegram will take care of the rest.

Engagement

With the help of Telegram, you can organize promotional campaigns. For instance, ask your customers to take photos inside your cafe/shop or with your product, post them to social networks and mention that they should send photos to you in order to get a reward. However, before doing so make sure that your target audience uses Telegram.

24/7 support

Most of the customers prefer texting over calling and that’s the proven fact. It doesn’t only take less time but allows customers to see the history of messages, so they don’t have to call back in case something they asked about previously slipped out of mind.

Advertising

No need to pay for expensive banners or even more expensive TV advertising – just send one message for your audience with the information you would like them to view, be it a sale or opening of the new store.

Instant feedback

Your clients can reach you the same way you can reach them – through the message. So, if there is the necessity to collect feedback – ask your clients about that or conduct a survey. In fact, messages are the perfect fit for this purpose because emails are often ignored, while calls may irritate people.

Safety

Nobody still managed to hack Telegram and its team is extremely proud of that fact. Actually, the founder of this messenger encourages community to hack Telegram and offers $300K if they succeed. However, no one has ever succeeded.

Availability

Nowadays, Telegram messenger covers all the main platforms. It has a mobile app for iOS, Android, Windows Phone along with the desktop apps for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Except for these, it has a web version. So, you shouldn’t worry that your customers won’t be able to access this platform.

Stickers

Telegram allows anybody to create own pack of stickers. For businesses, it’s a great opportunity to promote their brands by creating a pack of branded stickers and tell customers about that.

Transactions

At the moment, this feature is available in Brazil and Russia but we think that it will be available to a bunch of other countries soon. The thing is that this feature allows you transferring money as safe as in a bank.