Telegram broadcasts

A broadcast is a one-off Telegram message delivered as a direct message to all — or a filtered subset of — the contacts who have messaged your project's Telegram bot. Use it for product announcements, maintenance notices, or a promo aimed at your most active users. Telegram broadcasts are available on the Pro and Ultimate plans.

One Telegram rule to keep in mind: a bot can only message people who have already started a chat with it. Your audience is therefore always your existing bot contacts — broadcasts are for reaching your own users, not for cold outreach.

Before you start

• Your project needs an active Telegram bot channel. Broadcasts go out as 1:1 direct messages — Telegram group channels aren't supported.
• You need an admin or manager role in the project.
• Your plan must include broadcasts (Pro or Ultimate).

Sending a broadcast

1. Open your project's admin area and choose Broadcasts (Admin → Projects → your project → Marketing → Broadcasts).
2. Click New broadcast.
3. Pick the Telegram channel (bot) to send from.
4. Write your message — up to 4,096 characters, Telegram's own message limit.
5. Optionally attach files (see below).
6. Choose the audience and check the live recipient estimate.
7. Recommended: use Send a test first — open your bot, send it /start, and enter your numeric chat id to receive a single preview in your own chat.
8. Click Send broadcast.

Choosing the audience

By default a broadcast goes to every contact who has messaged the selected bot. Filters narrow this down, and they combine — a contact must match all of them:

• Active within — only contacts with conversation activity in the last 7, 30, 90, or 365 days (or any time).
• Language code — only contacts whose conversations are in the given language (e.g. en or ru).
• Tags — only contacts carrying at least one of the selected contact tags.

Specific users works the other way around: hand-pick up to 1,000 contacts and the broadcast goes only to them, ignoring every other filter.

The composer always shows a live estimate ("Sending to N recipients"). A single broadcast can reach up to 10,000 recipients — if more contacts match, you'll see a warning asking you to narrow the filters (for example, split the send by activity window or by tag).

Attachments

You can attach up to 10 files — photos, PDF documents, or MP4 videos. Following Telegram's convention, your message text is delivered as the caption of the first attachment, and the remaining files follow without captions. Text-only broadcasts are fine too, as are attachment-only ones.

Send rate, progress, and cancelling

Broadcasts are delivered at a deliberately safe pace — roughly 15 messages per second, well under Telegram's limits — so the same bot keeps handling live support conversations while the broadcast runs. A 10,000-recipient send takes about 10–12 minutes.

After you hit send, the broadcast's detail page tracks everything live: a progress bar, counters for recipients, sent, and failed deliveries, and a list of recent failures. While a broadcast is Sending you can click Cancel broadcast at any time — the remaining messages are stopped; already-delivered ones stay delivered.

Broadcasts start immediately after you send them (scheduling for a later time isn't available yet), and one broadcast runs per channel at a time.

How broadcasts appear in conversations

Each recipient receives the message inside their normal chat with your bot. In your inbox, it shows up in the contact's conversation history with a Broadcast badge that links back to the broadcast's detail page. A broadcast doesn't reopen or assign the conversation, and the AI deliberately ignores broadcast text when composing later replies — your announcement is never mistaken for part of the support dialogue. If a recipient replies, the reply arrives as a regular customer message and is handled as usual by the AI or your operators.

Blocked and unreachable recipients

Contacts you've blocked in Chatonio are excluded automatically. If Telegram rejects a delivery because the user has blocked your bot or deleted their account, that delivery is counted as failed and the contact is marked unreachable — future broadcasts skip them automatically, so your delivery stats stay clean without any manual list maintenance.