how we optimized the creation of the digest and involved studio employees in it
In this material, you will learn how you can create a Telegram bot without programming skills, collect interesting materials through it, and then carry out their weekly mailing.
Hello everyone, I’m Sasha Kombarov, head of the web studio. Our PR manager collects interesting materials on various resources, and then publishes them in the corporate chat, thereby enlightening employees, and in studio social networks, so that our subscribers are aware of news from the IT world:) I will tell you how we did it before and now
Compiling the digest used to take 4 to 6 hours every week, because you need to scour the portals in search of really interesting news, then design it beautifully and publish it. An example of a digest is here. To me, it seemed very resource-consuming, the quality of the material was not always good, because it is another challenge to single out interesting articles for frontenders and backenders to a girl without relevant knowledge.
Contents
You can’t refuse, you can optimize
On the one hand, the news digest in the studio chat gathered a positive reaction, likes and fires in social networks, and on the other hand, it demanded a full working day of a specialist every week. Stalemate 🙂
Hands were itching to optimize this process, but they did not get there until the PR manager went on vacation.
I decided to automate the bot through Telegram, the more experience we have in developing bots. They developed a service for automatic cryptocurrency exchange and connected robots to it.
I wrote out what work needed to be done:
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With a click, the user can send a link to the article;
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The service needs to know which user sent a certain article;
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A weekly digest can be sent to users who subscribe or submit articles.
Having drawn up the minimum requirements, I decided not to develop from scratch, but to use the constructor. Manybot turned out to be the most suitable.
Three simple steps to create a Telegram bot
To create a bot, I recommend using the web version of Telegram, at least it was more convenient for me, because the bot designer sends long instructions and you need to familiarize yourself with them.
Step one
Create a command that, when clicked, the user will receive a response corresponding to this command.
Step two
Select the type of message that is sent when the command is clicked. In our case, this is the question “Which article to place in the digest?”. But also in response to the user’s command, the bot can respond with one or several messages, including any files, music, pictures, etc.
Step three
Add a command to your bot’s menu so that it is displayed to the user.
You’re awesome 😉 Users can submit content to your work. You only need to collect them and send them through the command.
Summary and conclusions
It took about 30 minutes to implement the robot, which allowed us to save 3 to 5 working hours of the PR manager per week. Now it takes about 30-60 minutes to collect and publish a digest.
The staff enthusiastically accepted the idea of forming the digest themselves, sending suitable materials from various sources, many of which had not been considered before. Of course, sometimes you have to warm up interest in the bot, but on average 5-7 materials are sent every week.
Conclusion: If you think you can optimize something, you don’t 🙂 Don’t put this process in a long box.
Did you create a bot through the constructor or did you program the bot from scratch? Maybe you have links to suitable bots? Share in the comments to the article 🙂