How to Create an automated Telegram Bot to post in your Telegram Channel/Group

Telegram Channels are a vital tool for broadcasting messages to a theoretically unlimited audience. As for Telegram Groups (supporting communities of up to 200,000 and counting), they serve a similar function only that member can interact directly with each other among other things.

Telegram Channels and Groups by themselves can be a lot of work to manage. Unless you don’t intend to keep your followers for long, you need fresh content regularly streaming in. Some channels opt for forwarding content from other channels and Groups on top of creating periodical original content. As you can imagine, this is quite the labor of love. The smart move is to create your own Telegram bot to automate the process.

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Creating a Telegram bot doesn’t require a degree in robotics or some such. Any couch potato can have a bot up and running in under 10 minutes or so. You don’t require any coding experience, even. I kid you not.

In this post, we will show you how to create a Telegram bot to autopost articles of interest from Twitter, YouTube, VK and RSS feed with your legion of subscribers/members. By all accounts, this beats having to manually share this content.

Step 1: Create a Telegram Channel

  1. Simply head over to the hamburger menu on the top left corner of your Telegram app. This applies to both smartphone and desktop apps.
  2. Select ‘New Channel’ (The one with the broadcast icon).
  3. Go ahead and input your Channel name and optional corresponding Channel description.
  4. You can either set it as public or private, depending on your intentions. As a public channel, users may find it using their search box. A private channel, on the other hand, requires an Invite link to join.

Voila! One down, two to go!


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Step 2: Create a Telegram Bot for your Telegram Channel/Group

Create Telegram Bot

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As Telegram loves to say, BotFather is the one bot to rule them all. That’s where to start when creating new bots and manage existing bots. So then, that’s our next stop.

  1. Open BotFather. Type Botfather in your Telegram search box. Click on it to open the bot.
  2. Type the /newbot command to create a new bot. Choose a name for your new bot. Unless you intend this to be a public bot, the name doesn’t really matter. Our bot will be running the show from behind the scenes.
  3. Now choose a username for your new bot. Usernames can be between anywhere between 5-32 case-insensitive characters long. As a rule, the username must end with the suffix -bot, i.e dignitedfanbot.
  4. Once you are done you will receive an HTTP API token. i.e. something like: 435074775:AAHRQTtAOhQ1POBw9L98ru6Giek0qafTvME. Keep this token secure and store it safely. If anyone gets a hold of this token, they can fully control your bot.

Step 3: Use Manybot to autopost to your Telegram Channel/Group

Telegram bot

Now that we have a functional bot, we will use another bot to streamline the process. @Chatfuel_bot is a popular choice, but I have a personal favorite, @Manybot. Manybot will be the link between your Channel and the bot you created. In order to autopost content from your RSS feed, Twitter and YouTube, follow these steps:

  1. Open Manybot.
  2. Use /addbot command to create your first bot. (We have done this already, so yay!)
  3. Skip the step to create a new bot with Botfather as we have done it already.
  4. Click ‘I’ve copied the API token.’ Copy and paste the token you received after creating your bot in Botfather.
  5. Once the token is accepted, write a short description about your bot or skip this step.
  6. Your bot is now ready! Select ‘Send New Post to Subscribers.’

You will be sent to your newly created bot. From here you can send new posts to subscribers, deploy custom commands and form replies and all that. But let’s keep it simple for now. Head over to Settings at the bottom. You will see the following: Channels/Autoposting/Timezone/Cancel.

  • Click on ‘Channels‘ to start.
  • Select ‘Add Channel
  • Type Channel name/link. e.g Tech256 or https://t.me/tech256

Oops! We will hit a snag at this point. So let’s backtrack and go back to our Channel. We will set our bot as an Admin. To do this, we navigate to Channel settings, and then Administrators. We will then add our bot as Admin. Now to continue…

  • Go back to your bot and add your Channel.
  • After you are done, Select ‘Go Back
  • Select ‘Autoposting
  • Select content source i.e. Twitter(@username), YouTube channel, VK and RSS feed (e.g feed://dignited.com/feed)
  • Success!

Video tutorial on How to Set up Autoposting on your Telegram Channel/Group

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