[TeleLens | Your Best Ally for Pioneering Telegram Marketing] Why Should I Use TeleLens?
When you first try Telegram, it's great for chatting privately with friends. But using it to run a brand? TeleLens is a third-party back office for Telegram. Social media managers who know Facebook can think of it as something like “Ads Manager” or “Publishing Tools.” LINE managers can think of it as the LINE Official Account back office.
AbbieCustomer Success Manager
▍Introduction
Since 2015, a major wave of migration to a new social platform has hit every six months to a year, adding two, three, or more platforms and channels to your plate. To put it bluntly: “Good grief, tech moves so fast, @#$#@$!…”
Amid all the @#$#@$!…, ambitious, diligent, and responsible social media managers naturally keep studying. They meet with the team to debate whether to take on the new platform and whether it fits the brand's tone, analyze pain points and upsides, and pull together material for discussions with their bosses and coworkers. Drawing on my three years as a not-so-professional social media manager, this article looks at TeleLens entirely from a marketer's point of view and gives you five reasons to use it.
It pairs pain points with benefits, so I hope you can drop this information straight into your own decision report.
▍Outline
This article has two parts:
The five WHs of TeleLens
▍Meet TeleLens
▪ What is TeleLens?
TeleLens is a third-party back office for Telegram. Think of it this way:
- Social media managers who know Facebook would describe it as a back office like “Ads Manager” or “Publishing Tools.”
- LINE managers would describe it as the back office of a LINE Official Account.
The difference: TeleLens is more intuitive / user-friendly / easy to use! Posting is simple, and so is checking your data!
Also, we're not the official developer. TeleLens is built by a third-party company, OakMega, and exclusively distributed by SheQunDon!
▪ Who is TeleLens?
TeleLens | Your best ally for pioneering Telegram marketing.
When you first try Telegram, it really is great for chatting privately with friends. But using it to run a brand? You end up asking: Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing? It's like being in a soap opera, getting slapped, bumping into a cabinet, and waking up with amnesia. Nothing but question marks.
On top of that, the only brands on Telegram were overseas. There were no well-known cases in Taiwan, and overseas marketing wins rarely translate into a formula you can apply yourself. Before you know it, you're Tom Hanks with Wilson the volleyball, stranded on a desert island with a strong will to survive but no idea what to do.
TeleLens really is the ally that comes to your rescue. Don't worry if your English isn't great: the interface is fully in Chinese. Once you understand Telegram's basic concepts, you can start running your brand on it.
And don't worry about getting the hang of it, either. At least 99 other partners are joining the TeleLens closed beta with you. With that many brands running their communities, you'll never be short of people to discuss things with or ask for help!
📖Further reading:
Telegram 101: How to Build a Brand Community on TelegramLast time, we called Telegram the rising star of conversational commerce, and more and more brands have been moving onto it. This article offers a first look at how brands can use Telegram: (1) Use cases for Telegram Channels, Bots, and Groups (2) A brand's first step into Telegram (3) How Telegram's setup compares with other messaging apps for push messageshttp://oakmega.com/blog/how-to-use-telegram-community
▪ How to use TeleLens?
First-round survey period: 4/1–4/15 (closed)
The first closed beta round is limited to 100 spots.
We'll announce the first closed beta list by 4/15 and notify you by email. 100 spots in total.
“Hands-on guidance” here is just a figure of speech. We won't actually hold your hand. We're not about to become a COVID loophole (sob).
▪ Where is TeleLens?
TeleLens | Nickname: Taylor Lens
Birthplace: Da'an District, Taipei
Birthday: April 1
Species: SaaS software
Family: A multi-parent family (more than two parents). No one in the family has a recent travel history, nobody went to Kenting, and everyone is used to keeping in touch remotely, so there's no risk of droplet transmission.
▪ Why TeleLens?
Keep reading Part 2 and you'll find out! I'm definitely not just being lazy.
👀 30-second intermissionAd: TeleLens | Your best ally for pioneering Telegram marketing
1/ Telegram's unique position among messaging apps
The biggest doubt many people have about Telegram is: not many people in Taiwan use it, so can I really make it work? There's no need to worry too much. To borrow a line from Han Kuo-yu, “Stand firm in Taiwan, embrace the mainland, look to the world, conquer the universe,” the Telegram market for Taiwanese brands simply runs in the reverse order:
Telegram caught on overseas before coming back to Taiwan: Han Kuo-yu's famous line, reversed.
Telegram is widely used in Russia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Brazil, Europe, and many other places. Looking at the app alone, Telegram has 300M MAU, making it one of the world's top 10 messaging apps, in the same tier as LINE and Viber.
In the past, community building worked like this: brands moved in only after a platform had plenty of users. Judging by MAU, major international brands don't need to worry about conquering the universe or looking to the world; they can move in with confidence. But brands of every size share one question:
How do you stand firm in Taiwan?
Picture the Taiwan market as Taipei's Xinyi District in 1997. Since its first department store opened, Xinyi has become the place with the highest density of department stores in the world, a uniquely Taiwanese phenomenon.
If brands start building communities on Telegram one by one now, Telegram may well become the online Xinyi District. Brands attract more brands, clusters of brands bring loyal users, and users attract more users. That's the legendary…
2/ Ease the growing pains of platform migration
The growing pains of moving to a new platform are a big reason many marketers hesitate to make the jump. After all, nobody knows if things will run smoothly once the pain is over.
Running Telegram doesn't mean giving up LINE, Facebook, Messenger, and so on. A multichannel approach is one way to spread risk. But if, for whatever reason, choosing Telegram means you have to give up other channels, that's all the more reason to join the TeleLens closed beta.
When you first started on LINE, FB, or Messenger, being the dedicated marketer you are, you surely did three things: learned the platform's traits, looked for reference cases, and set an initial strategy (posting whatever your talent comes up with counts as a strategy too).
Once you join the TeleLens closed beta, we'll use every method we can to be your Telegram community supply station: helping you learn the platform's traits, getting you up to speed fast on the posting back office and tools, sending regular tutorial and trend EDMs, and guiding you through your initial strategy.
Why such a sweet deal? Are OakMega and SheQunDon running charities? I can at least confirm OakMega isn't. Honestly, this deal is only available during the closed beta.
3/ Ease “your” growing pains
When you start something brand new, having a teacher, partners, and clear guidance and steps can dramatically cut your learning time. But we're no strict cram-school tutor or rote-learning system, either. The creative side is all yours.
After you join the closed beta, we'll give you a free TeleLens goodie bag that includes the TeleLens user manual, Telegram marketing trends, and a community where brand managers discuss together, lowering your barrier to entry on every front.
Closed betas make you think of mobile games, so let's look at it from a gamer's angle!
After you join the closed beta, you'll see the following messages and steps:
(Character = brand; NPC = anyone, or OakMega)
- Create a character = Set up your brand account
- Enter the starter village = Join the TeleLens closed beta community
- An NPC hands you starter gear and supplies = We show you what you can do once your brand is set up
- NPCs stay in plain sight all along the way. If you don't know what to do, talk to them. Every once in a long while, they'll even stop you to chat and check in on you 🥺🥺🥺
On your journey building a Telegram community, we want to give you plenty of peace of mind and a little more warmth. TeleLens may be SaaS, but in these early days we want to add more of a human touch.
4/ Low cost with the potential for high value
Lens Taylor: “Marketing, like life, always calls for flexibility.” TeleLens will dramatically lower the risk of moving into Telegram.
TeleLens cares about your health. We know that when you're starting a new community, you need the “three lows”: low time cost, low time, and low financial investment. Having a free yet high-quality tool as your ally is clearly a great choice.
While you're still testing the waters, you may not dare or want to invest too many resources. So choose a tool with great value for money; even if it fails, you won't lose much. But once it succeeds, it becomes a great experience of creating high value for your brand at low cost.
How do you define success? That depends on how you set your brand KPIs, and during the closed beta we'll also provide reference strategies for setting them.
5/ Choose an experienced third-party tool as your content springboard
OakMega, the parent of TeleLens, is no newcomer to SaaS. Its products include BotFat, a third-party back office for managing LINE Official Accounts, which continues to serve many well-known brands. We won't go into which brands here, because we've been so focused on technology that we've rarely written marketing case studies. If you're curious, though, check out OakMega's Medium!
TeleLens isn't an entirely new service. It's a platform tailor-made for the traits of Telegram communities, built on the user experience we've gathered from creating a third-party back office for LINE.
What TeleLens is made of:
TeleLens ingredients, as shown above.
▍Conclusion
Here's my most honest pros and cons from a social media manager's point of view:
Pros: the five points above
Cons: one more thing to run, and that really is tiring
From a social media manager's point of view, if you think you need to be on Telegram, TeleLens is a great choice.
And it's free during the closed beta!
