Reactions and buttons

Current implementation in Telegram

In Telegram, you can add "reactions" to messages based on emoji (likes, dislikes and other emotions), when you click on them, the clicks are counted. Considering that the set of emojis is quite large, you can always choose the ones you need to display certain emotions. Usually, reactions are used in social networks, but we are glad that they are also in Telegram.

Let's note some advantages of reactions:

• Increase subscriber engagement;
• Useful for new channel or group visitors who haven't signed up yet. They see how subscribers rate the content, and how active they are in the group, and conclude whether they should join or not;
• Show advertisers how much live group or channel (if you plan to sell advertising);
• Reactions can be used as an alternative to surveys;
• You can simply diversify communication in private chats or groups, etc.;

Also, Telegram has the ability to add buttons to your message. The button is located under the post, has a title and an embedded link. There can be several buttons with different names and links.

Buttons also have many advantages, for example:

• Replacing long links with nice and compact buttons;
• There is no need to interfere with the post itself and violate its content, because buttons are located separately under the post;
• You can create directory posts by creating a description and the necessary buttons below it to go to the desired section, etc.;

Problem

As often happens in Telegram, interesting functions are not used by all users. The implementation is clearly non-native and requires additional study and instructions, in this case for working with bots. Of course, channel administrators have long been using a specialized bot like @ControllerBot, while ordinary users get by with a simpler one like @likebot.

But all this limits us and divides the users of the messenger into those who are ready to bother with bots and those who simply do not use them.

Decision

The iMe team decided to develop a simple and convenient tool for creating messages with reactions and buttons, without directly working with the bot and without any additional knowledge. And it seems that we managed to implement such a tool!

To start our functionality, you need to activate our @iMeLikeBot helper bot once. Just open the chat with the bot, press Start, exit the bot and forget about it. In the future, all work with this bot will take place in the background and you do not have to go into it or send messages to it. You can send the bot to the archive so that it does not interfere with you in the general list of chats.

So, create a chat message, no matter just a text message or from the media files, press and hold the Send button (airplane on the right) and select the "Add reactions" item. Next, in the native interface, select emoji for reactions and create buttons. Everything is ready, we send a message!

It is important to know:

• If you create a message with a heavy video, it may take some time for the file to load, which will be signaled by the loading indicator;
• You can swap both reactions and buttons by dragging them through the hold;
• Maximum 6 reactions and 12 buttons can be added;
• You can choose the layout of the buttons by the number of columns;
• If you do not add a link to the created button, the message will not be sent.

Lifehack:

If you need to create more than one button with a link, then use the device's clipboard to first save several links to memory and then insert them into buttons while in the button creation interface.

*- available for Android, under development for iOS.