Telegram Features for Business in 2024: Exploring New Functionality

Every few months, Telegram launches new features—so many that it’s hard to know where to start. In this article, we’ll explore the key tools introduced at the beginning of 2024 and review the upcoming feature releases planned for the rest of the year.

Feature 1: Running Your Business with Telegram Premium

Telegram currently offers quite a broad range of features in its new tool “Telegram for Business.” Some interesting options include the ability to list your business profile’s office or store address, working hours, and set up automatic welcome messages for new clients. For example, there’s an “Away” feature that automatically sends a pre-written message—set by the admin—to clients who write during off-hours. The subscription costs $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year. Currently, “Telegram for Business” is available for free with a Telegram Premium subscription, but developers plan to make it a separate paid feature in the future.

Feature 2: Brand Communities in Telegram Groups

Telegram groups are a powerful tool for brand communities because they allow you to gather like-minded people and customers in one place to discuss trends, new products or promotions, run interactive activities and polls, share great themed content, and more.

At the end of February 2024, the Telegram team released a major update for groups. Here’s what’s new:

• Group boosts. Now groups can earn levels through gifts and boosts, just like channels. The higher the level, the more premium features unlock for group members. These include, for example, automatic transcription of voice messages or custom stickers.
• Stories for groups. With the new update, group admins and creators now have the ability to create stories for group members. They can share brand or blog news and updates, show behind-the-scenes or backstage moments, and more. Create a new content format and don’t limit yourself when it comes to ideas and experiments!

• Expanded group customization options. Powered-up groups support unique features for personalizing their appearance. You can change the color and background icon of the group profile cover, set an emoji status, and choose wallpapers that everyone joining the group will see. The new update also brings new colors, animations, emoji statuses, and more.
• Ability to add custom emojis. Now you can choose from ready-made emojis or create your own that match your brand’s or blog’s style. Just keep in mind that these custom emojis will only be available for your subscribers to use within the group.

Effective use of these features will definitely boost user engagement in the group and become another building block in creating a strong and friendly community of customers. Of course, the key to success is the content itself, but with these new tools, new opportunities for creativity also open up!

Feature 3: Mini Apps for Businesses

The new functionality for developing mini-apps in Telegram allows you to create flexible interfaces based on JavaScript that work directly within the messenger, complementing or even replacing a website. Similar to Telegram bot development, mini-apps support integrated payments, push notifications to clients, and many other exciting features. This is a great opportunity to simplify the lives of your group or channel subscribers by providing all the necessary information with just one click — for example, a restaurant menu, current promotional offers, contact methods, links to new content on other social networks, or online order placement.

Recommendations from developers for developers:

• All elements should be adaptive and developed with a mobile-first approach in mind;
• Interactive elements should mimic the style and identity of your brand or blog;
• All available animations in the mini-app should be smooth, ideally running at 60 frames per second;
• All data and images must include accessibility tags;
• The app should ensure seamless operation by tracking dynamic colors and themes via the API and accordingly using them.

Implementation of the mini-app:

With the new update, Telegram supports six different ways to launch mini-apps: via keyboard button, built-in button, bot menu button, inline mode, direct link — and even from the attachment menu.

You can read more about the development aspects of creating mini-apps in Telegram on the messenger’s official website.

Feature 4: New Functions for Telegram Bots

Telegram bots have become indispensable helpers for admins of channels and groups — they automate many small tasks related to client management, letting you enjoy your morning coffee instead of handling everything manually!

One of the recent updates includes: integration of bots with business accounts, expanded reactions, the ability to reply to messages in other chats, customizable link previews, implementation of block quoting, enhanced multi-message actions, and more.

You can find the full list of the latest technical updates on Telegram’s official website, as this functionality is being updated almost weekly!

Feature 5: Unique Branded Stickers with Built-in Sticker Editor in Telegram

Starting today, anyone can quickly create stickers and entire sticker packs using the powerful new built-in editor — all without leaving Telegram. This is a fantastic opportunity to delight your subscribers with unique, fresh content. You can make memes featuring your team members, stylized illustrations, or quick replies in an authentic design — any idea will definitely resonate with users, since many of us prefer sending a sticker of a crying cat instead of a formal “Edits noted, ready to proceed” reply 🙂 Unleash your creativity to the fullest with Telegram’s new handy features!

Just pick any photo and add text, drawings, or countless animated stickers, emojis, and GIFs already available on the platform. Never before in human (or cat) history has turning cats into visual art been this easy! With just one tap, you can cut out an object and remove the background. You can manually erase or restore parts of the photo, as well as add an outline to achieve that classic sticker look.

Since April of this year, it has become possible to add convenient link previews for all sticker packs and emojis. The developers promise to add several exciting updates to the sticker editor later this year, but first — don’t you need to create a few stickers?

A few more cool things from Telegram!

• You can now customize the empty chat screen (before the first message). For example, you can indicate that you don’t respond to “hi” messages or specify which services you do (or don’t) provide.
• Quick Replies. A super feature announced earlier: prepare templates with answers to common customer questions.
• Now you can tag every chat with your own label. For example, mark an important client with a yellow tag ASAP, a difficult client with a red tag, and colleagues with green. It works together with folders, meaning you can’t create a tag on its own without folders.
• Chat Links. Now you can do more than just share your Telegram username on a website (or QR code at a location) — you can create a unique link with a pre-written message that the client only needs to send.

What to expect next?

In April 2024, the Token 2049 conference took place, where Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was one of the speakers. He announced upcoming features planned for release soon. Among them: admins of public channels will be able to receive payments for advertising, users will be able to tip admins in the TON cryptocurrency, and stickers and emojis can be bought and sold as NFTs, with 95% of the revenue going to the creators. Additionally, major updates to “Telegram for Business” and new features for Telegram Premium are planned for 2024.

To stay updated on the latest Telegram updates and trends, follow Telegram Agency on Instagram — that’s where we keep our finger on the pulse of all the new features and share tons of useful tips!