How I grew a Telegram channel to 2000 subscribers in under a week.

How I grew a Telegram channel to 2000 subscribers in under a week.

Jun 3, 2018·9 min read

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Ifyou’re wondering, the Telegram channel is Kiasu Foodies. It has one purpose: To update subscribers of all the latest food discounts, promotions and deals in Singapore. Kiasu is a word from the commonly spoken Hokkien dialect in Singapore. The word is colloquially used to describe the typical Singaporean — terrified of losing out. As you can see, Kiasu Foodies was therefore a very apt name for the channel.

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Since 21 May, it has grown to about 2.5k subscribers.

Here I share the 6 steps that proved pertinent in helping me to grow the channel. I will not waste your time with marketing clichés or generic advice. I do not intend to wax some kind of poetic you may have already heard of. Everything I cover in this article will be a condensed summary of what has worked — and what has not.

1. Provide value at-a-glance.

What is value? While value can be construed in many different ways, I believe that crux of it is that it has to be inherently useful to your audience. Facebook’s value proposition is that it connects you to the people around you. Airbnb provides travellers with cheaper alternative accommodation while Uber pretty much does the same thing with transport.

In this case, the value of food discounts are indisputable — who wouldn’t want to buy food at cheaper prices? Kiasu Foodies took off because it offered something that anyone could benefit from, period.

I see many established content platforms falling into the same pitfall. Despite their sizeable online reach, many of their telegram channels fail to take off. This is because such Telegram channels often provide nothing more than updates of the articles they publish on their websites. They initially manage to get a sizeable subscriber-base from their other media channels but soon see their subscriber growth plateu and then stagnate.

“Why?” you ask? The answer is simple. Users simply don’t value such article updates and those who do probably don’t need such reminders anyway. The bottom line is, unless you are creating a channel that is perceived to be of value, it’s not going to work.

Also, note that I didn’t just stop at value. While providing value is important, it must come together with speed. The purpose of a telegram channel is to streamline information, so that it can be delivered to your audience in the most concise and efficient manner. Consumers want value, but they also want it quick. If readers have to click further to get the information they need, that’s a roadblock that will greatly hinder the user experience.

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In Kiasu Foodies, I ensure that everything the user might want to know is included in my channel updates, be it opening hours, prices, dates or even the store locations. Where relevant, I include screen-grabs of the promotions for easier reading.

If you want a successful telegram channel, you must be able to condense all the information your subscribers would ever need into one message.

2. Differentiate your channel.

Who are the substitutes in the market? How are you any different? I realised that while there were many websites and Instagram accounts out there that provided food deals, there wasn’t a single Telegram channel solely dedicated to that. Making one for food discounts was thus a no-brainer, and I was confident it would work since a Telegram channel meant that people no longer had to manually visit websites to find food discounts and promotions. All they had to do was to wait for a notification that caught their eye and click on that.

If you intend to make a Telegram channel, ensure that it will be the fastest platform to deliver the content you want to your audience.

If an alternative platform already exists that gets the job done more quickly, you might want to reconsider your value proposition.

3. Deliver consistent content.

This is not easy. When Kiasu Foodies first started, I started off by Googling for food deals and promotions in Singapore. I then compiled a list of websites that provided such deals. Since then, I spend about 10–15 minutes every day going through these websites and procuring the best deals to share on Kiasu Foodies.

One of the benchmarks of any successful content platform is that they produce consistent, quality content.

It is no different for a Telegram channel. I make it a point to post at least one deal a day so that my subscribers are constantly engaged. Similarly, you should also post regularly so that you maintain your brand presence and encourage word-of-mouth sharing.

Additionally, the timing of your posts matters too. For Kiasu Foodies, I try to schedule my post timings slightly before standard lunch or dinner timings. My rationale for this is so that subscribers get notified of potential food discounts at places they can actually go to for meals — which would then prompt them to share the discounts with their friends and colleagues. This would then start a chain-reaction of sharing. I believe this has proven effective, since every time after I post an update, I see a small spike in subscriber numbers.

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