Watching life start to drain out of your Telegram channel can be an extremely trying time, but even if you've started to think that it’s out for the count, hope is not lost! A Telegram channel at its lowest ebb is rarely a lost cause, and in fact may be an excellent opportunity for you to build out a community that not only returns to those glory days but surpasses them, this time achieving and exceeding the goals you started out with.
This guide will take you through the seven key steps involved in reviving a dead or dying Telegram channel, giving you not just a solid strategy but an actionable outline of what you need to do to bring your channel back to life.
How to Revive a Telegram Channel in 7 Steps
If you want to bring life back to a dying Telegram channel, follow these seven steps.
1. Evaluate Why Your Channel is No Longer Active
Before you can start taking solid steps toward breathing life back into your Telegram channel, it’s a great idea to spend some time analyzing what exactly led to the onset of inactivity.
With a lot of Telegram channels, owners find that the channel’s members slowly start to veer away from its original purpose or topic. This isn’t something you can control outright, but it does signal to you that you might have missed an opportunity in the first place, or that you’ve gone after the wrong target group.
If your Telegram channel was similarly a victim of slow derailment, all you can do is count it as a lesson learned. That being said, you don’t want to lose sight of your own goals with the channel either—especially if you were looking at building a subject-specific community and eventual monetization, you’ll want to approach reviving your Telegram channel with that goal front and center.
2. Canvas Channel Members
You’ll find that your analysis and findings as detailed in the previous step will help a lot, but actually talking to existing members will help you just as much. Inactivity won’t mean that everyone has left, and you probably have a few channel OG’s lurking in the group—so use them!
These members would have joined your community for a reason, and if they’ve stuck around, it could be in the hope that you step in and revive it. They might once have been active, but as the Telegram channel declined, chosen to be quieter and more inactive too. Well, it’s time to give them a chance to speak.
Understanding why these members joined your Telegram channel in the first place will give you a great idea of what sort of community goals to aim for, and their feedback in terms of what they liked and disliked about the channel will help too. You can use these members as a sounding board and an extremely valuable source of information that can inform your strategy for how to set the channel up for success post-revival.
Here are some questions that you might consider asking existing members:
Why did you join the Telegram channel in the first place?
- This’ll help you call new members to action when marketing the channel post revival, and underlines what the channel should be striving toward all the time. Never lose sight of goals.
What kind of events would you like to see going forward?
- We’ll discuss engagement a little later, but doing events and activities within your community is a great way to keep people involved and ensure things don’t peter out again.
What do you like and dislike about the channel?
- Double down on the good stuff, and look to solve the problems that people bring up. Honest feedback along these lines can help to make sure your Telegram channel is a positive part of your members’ lives.
Was the channel moderation to your liking?
- Effective moderation can alleviate a lot of the problems that Telegram channels see, but when moderation goes wrong it could also become a reason for the group dying off. This question can help you understand where your moderation was at, and where it needs to be.
Would you be willing to pay for more features or content? If so, what would you like to have and what’s a fair price?
- If you’ve already signaled serious intention to revive your Telegram channel and the member you’re talking to is keen on the idea, you’ve got a green light to ask this. You might be surprised, but premium options and features can really help to get your channel off on the right foot post-reboot—we’ll get into how in more detail later.
3. Remove Inactive Users
Having a lot of members in your Telegram channel is great, but not when they’re inactive, neither contributing nor engaging—and seeing lots of inactive users doesn’t give new members a great first impression. While you want a big group, it needs to be active, so it’s time to start removing people who haven’t been active in the recent months.
If the members you boot truly are inactive, they probably won’t mind–or even notice–that you’ve removed them, so you don’t need to worry too much about offending anyone. Still, it’s a great idea to inform people that they’re being removed on grounds of inactivity, and you can try sending them a new invite link so that they can actively decide to rejoin if they want to see how your channel is moving forward.
Ultimately, you want to be focused on engagement, and inactive members don’t help at all in this regard. Any of them who you can get to rejoin will likely be engaged at the start, and you have a good chance to keep them that way.
4. Refresh Your Channel’s Appearance
There are a lot of differences between ecommerce and traditional brick and mortar businesses, but they’re similar in this respect—if you’re reviving a dying business, one of the primary ingredients is bound to be a fresh lick of paint. In much the same manner, a refresh of your Telegram channel’s look and feel can do wonders when bringing it back to life.
Among other things, a fresh new look can help signal to your members that things are picking up again, and it can build a sense of excitement and anticipation for what is to come. It’s not just about the hype, though—this is a great opportunity for you to reorganize things a little bit, correcting any previous flaws or inefficiencies and laying the groundwork for the changes you’re bringing.
This is also a great opportunity to look into automation by setting up a Telegram bot or two. Anything that can make your life easier as the channel host is a good thing, and even though bots are premium features on Telegram, they’re well worth looking into.
5. Brainstorm New Content
A new look is good, but it won’t count for much unless you actually bring in new content. There are a lot of things you can do in this regard, and each one will benefit your Telegram channel in different ways.
One of the most popular options when it comes to adding a spark to a flagging channel is a giveaway. There’s very little that engages members more than the chance to get something for free, and giveaways of different types can motivate any sort of event you choose to package them in. Think things like constests, driving participation and engagement with a little pot of proverbial gold at the end.
That being said, there are different ways in which your members can gain from special events or other one-offs that you choose to introduce. Events like webinars can be done in this way or even become a part of your Telegram channel’s regular schedule, providing participants with highly valuable knowledge imparted directly from you.
Scheduling content is a crucial component of reviving a Telegram channel as well, because one-off events are just that—they can provide a nice boost but there’s a big risk of the channel tailing off again unless you’ve got something to sustain it. Use the subject matter of your Telegram channel artfully! If it’s a trading channel, you could plan daily or weekly events around market close or option expiration. If it’s sports betting, well, there’s a lot of games going on at all sorts of times throughout the year.
Lastly, whatever the content strategy you decide to go with, consider setting up on a calendar for your members. Then they know what to look forward to and when, and that slight added pressure can help you to stay consistent too.
6. Announce the Changes to Your Channel
Once your new content is ready to go, your channel is looking how you want it, and inactive users have been removed, it’s time to promote and re-launch. At this point you can kick things into overdrive, shooting out communications to your members and advertising the fact that it’s all systems go once again.
Don’t neglect the importance of making this re-launch of your channel a calendar-worthy event in its own right. It can serve as a formal milestone and a new beginning, setting a new frame for your channel to develop—whatever shortcomings there were in the past can now be left behind, and your Telegram channel can effectively start anew.
7. Prioritize Engagement and Growth
Now that your “new” and improved Telegram channel is back on its feet, it’s time to keep your foot on the gas. In order to avoid letting the channel stagnate and wind down for a second time, you’ll need to keep on growing it at a successful rate while also ensuring that existing members remain engaged.
Both growth and engagement can work in isolation, since a constant influx of new members will continue to breathe life into a channel. However, you’ll find that members quickly become inactive after that initial honeymoon phase, and soon enough even your highly-motivated new members will notice the imbalance between user count and actual activity.
Keeping your user count stable but engaged might be a more sustainable strategy in the long run, but it has its down-sides too. Members can move on as time passes or become inactive due to circumstances that are fully out of your control, and it’s hard to please every single person all of the time.
So, aiming to keep growth up while also providing plenty of opportunities for engagement will allow you to benefit from both worlds—increasing retention and keeping current members engaged and active, their fire constantly fed by the fuel of regular additions to the flock as new members add their energy to the mix.
The Best Way to Engage a Telegram Channel? Get Paid Subscribers
We’ve already talked about several ways to engage channel members, but you might be surprised to hear that the number one way to really get your members bought in and engaged is to go premium. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t slack off on your content or go easy with your calendar, but a premium subscription can actually provide a massive boost in engagement when paired with lots of value.
The fact is, channel members who pay for the privilege of being a part of your community are going to be, by far, the most motivated members you have. It’s not easy to get people to part with their cash, so by paying to be part of your Telegram channel, these members are signaling that they’re really, really keen.
On top of the benefits brought to your channel by having such highly motivated and engaged members, the cash that they bring in allows you to invest in your Telegram channel and make it an even better product—your premium memberships will allow you to pay for premium features and even hire mods who can not only help you to manage the channel but also start putting out content on your behalf.
Revive Your Telegram Channel with Whop
A dead or dying Telegram channel doesn’t mean the end of the world, nor does it necessarily mean that you need to go all the way back to square one and start again. Your Telegram channel can easily be revived if you go about it the right way, first taking the time to understand why activity dwindled in the first place, and then coming out with a step-by-step strategy to breathe new life back into it through a refreshed appearance, new content, and premium memberships.
The right platform partner can also help to make this process that much easier. With Whop, you can set up a hub (your own whop) through which you can not only sell access to your Telegram channel but also run giveaways and other contests, host forums, sell digital products like eBooks and other downloads, and so much more.
Whop brings all of these content options together in one convenient place, so that you can offer much more value to your online community.
