Telegram Bots - Tips for your bot

Useful tips to make your bot more likable and successful

There are a lot of Telegram bots out there, and now we have one (or a couple) more now - made by you. So, what to do to make it truly outstanding?

It is so easy to make Telegram bots, that almost everyone (knowing this API) will have one. So, to make your bot stand out, you will need to make sure of following things:

Cosmetics

The interface that Telegram provides is pretty great. So, you only have a few things to make your bot stand out in terms of its appearance:

  • Make a good icon for your bot

  • Provide great description and about details - defining its purpose

  • Make sure to use emojis where possible, as they would add color to your text

  • Try to use images (and if possible, use generated images with Guest's name on it, if possible)

User Experience

Try to make the user's experience using your bot worthy of it.

  • Provide global commands for easy access to tasks that your bot can perform
  • Provide a few commands like settings and help so that user can directly pick them from the top menu as well. Help and Settings in Menu
  • Don't hesitate to provide additional commands (other than global commands), so there is less typing involved from user's side. And rest assured, they will be interpreted for user and implement them in your code.
  • Send status of what action your bot is doing using sendChatAction method. It accepts chat_id and action as its parameter. Like when sending a text, send typing and so on. This can be done as soon as you receive an update on your web hook and send the response in the output.
  • Use deep linking for allowing a user to have a great experience from start
Security

Make sure to keep your bot secure, so that it is not susceptible to data hacks/ leaks.

  • Keep the data type of variables up to date with latest API guidelines like for storing user id, use at least 54-bit integer (longint)
  • Create a CRON task to update the web hook URL for your bot after a considerable time (not too often though).
  • Filter the incoming IPs to actually ensure that the updates are indeed from Telegram servers
  • Keep an eye out for error logs and even events, so that something unexpected does not happen
Ideas

Implement ideas that are novel.

There are many bots already on Telegram that provide things like anonymous chat bots (yeah, sure), feed reader bot, virtual buddy, timer bot, reminder bot, trivia bot, etc.

So, your bot must be unique in what it implements

  • It must stand out from crowd
  • It must give something that is truly useful (as compared with websites, apps that do this already)
  • It must be fast and responsive (who wants to wait for a bot to respond?)
  • It should not do any heavy lifting like video conversion (who would ask a bot to convert a video)
  • It should not be a copy of already popular bot

Also, you need to keep in mind (and accept) that a user will always have a way to block your bot and you will have no option for that feedback you needed or even know about it later that your bot was blocked. So, never give a chance to your user to abandon you by creating a bot that will really be helpful for her.

You may create bots that are sort of a branch of already existing bots like web feed reader but with filters (there may already be one, but this is just an idea), works like an app would work (here you win as there is no additional installation required to run) and so on.

Popularize your bot

Now, that you have created your first bot, where do you advertise it?

There are many platforms that provide a list of active and great bots. A quick google will show you those. You can ask them to add your bot to the list too.

You can even ask bloggers to talk about your bot.

There is a reddit community dedicated to Telegram bots as well, you may get some users from there as well.

And, don't forget to add screenshots for your bot when adding it to these directories, as it might increase chances of your bot being received well.

So, now that you have seen a few tips about making your bot more likable. We will see a sample bot code showing in brief about the general implementation and you can draw inspiration from that as well.

These articles are a part of Telegram bot series and will be using PHP as their coding language. But if you read through the code, you can easily adapt the code to be used in any language.