How To Reply To A Tumblr Post

Post to Telegram with markdown, comments and reactions

Hi to all Telegram fans! Today we gonna talk about this messenger and some extra features you can use within it. First of all, let me provide small introduction for people who don't use Telegram much (don't think they read this though 😄). In Telegram you can create a channel where you post messages to people subscribed to it. That means you have just a one way flow and there is no chance to get a feedback on your posts from subscribers (followers). This is quite frustrating but it's how Telegram works so far.

But what I really love Telegram for is so that there is a huge collection of bots around it. And I've just found couple of nice bots what can easily solve our issue.

CommentsBot

This b o t I've found and tried first. It doesn't require any installation and ready to use straight away. You just need to find this bot in your Telegram, (for instance, by his name @CommentsBot) and send him your post. The message can be written in Markdown format and it's absolutely great feature! It allows you to format your message in a nice way and promote your idea much better. Once you sent a message to the bot, you should see the preview of it with next options, something like this:

As you probably guessed already, now you just need to click the Publish button. The messenger app will ask you to choose a channel where you want to post the message to. So choose it and you're done! Pretty easy, isn't it?

How posted message looks like in a channel

Here is the result, how it looks like in a channel. You can see that text is formatted with Markdown and there is a big button Comments below the message. That button redirects you to a web page with comments for that post. That's the way it works.

ControllerBot

This bot has a list of great features: you can schedule your posts, check their statistics. But my favorite feature is reactions. You can add small buttons below the post with different emoji's. That allows you to get a feedback from your subscribers in a one click. You should admit that people are lazy now (are you? 😄). I'm pretty sure that not all the subscribers want to go to the comments page to share your thoughts. But reactions are different. A chance that follower will click on the button with emoji is much-much higher. But it's already such a useful feedback for you!

ControllerBot requires some small setup before using it:

First, you need to create a new bot specially for publishing purpose. Find a BotFather in Telegram and drop him a message /newbot, then just follow instructions from him. It should ask you to choose a name for your bot and then bot will be created and you will be given its token.
Now you can start connecting a new channel to the ControllerBot. Just drop him the message /addchannel.
It will ask for the token of your publisher bot. You've already created it, just send it back to ControllerBot.
Then go to the channel where you want to post upgraded messages to and add your publisher bot into the list of its admins. Obviously, it needs permissions to be able to post messages there.
Go back to ControllerBot and send him name of the channel where you gonna post stuff.
In the end it should ask for your city to fix a timezone. Just reply to it with a city name.

That's pretty much it. You can play a bit with bot's settings but it should be ready to go! This list of steps to set it up might look scary but don't worry. Actually, the bot helps you on every step and tells you exactly what to do. It's very easy to set it up!