How to connect Telegram to Postia

Postia publishes to Telegram channels and groups through a bot: the shared Postia bot, or one of your own.

What it takes
Keeps your formatting. Up to 4096 characters, or 1024 under a photo.
How it connects
Add the Postia bot to your channel as an administrator, or bring a bot of your own and paste its token.
Plans
On every plan, the free one included.
Crosspost rules
Yes. A crosspost rule can watch it and send what appears there on to your other channels.

Step by step

  1. Open your channel in Telegram, then Manage channel, then Administrators.
  2. Add @PostiaAutoPostBot as an administrator.
  3. Leave the Post messages permission on. It is the only one Postia needs; the rest can stay off.
  4. In Postia press Add account, pick Telegram, and keep "Use the Postia bot" selected.
  5. Type your channel as @yourchannel and press Connect.

If something goes wrong, the form shows the network's own answer in words, and nothing is saved until the connection works.

Questions about Telegram

How do I connect a private channel?

A private channel has no @name. Send one of its messages to a bot like @userinfobot and use the numeric id it reports — it starts with -100.

Can I use my own Telegram bot instead of yours?

Yes, and on a channel you care about it is the better answer: the shared bot is an administrator in other people's channels too, and your own is only in yours.

  1. Write to @BotFather in Telegram and send /newbot.
  2. Give it a name and a username. BotFather replies with a token that looks like 123456:ABC-DEF.
  3. Add your new bot to the channel as an administrator with Post messages, exactly as above.
  4. In Postia press Add account, pick Telegram, choose "Use my own bot" and paste the token.
  5. Type the channel and press Connect.

The token is the bot. Anyone holding it can post as your bot, so paste it here and nowhere else. Postia stores it encrypted.

Telegram answered "chat not found". What now?

That message comes from Telegram, not from Postia, and it means the bot cannot see the chat you named. Three things cause it.

  1. The bot is not an administrator in that channel yet, or it was removed.
  2. The @name has a typo, or the channel was renamed since.
  3. The channel is private, so it has no @name and needs its numeric id instead.
Does this work for a group, not a channel?

Yes. The rule is the same: the bot has to be in the group as an administrator with permission to send messages.

How many images can one Telegram post carry?

Telegram sends up to ten as a single album. Text longer than about a thousand characters does not fit an album caption, so Postia sends it as its own message right after the images rather than cutting it.

Formatting — bold, italics, links — is kept. A post without pictures can run to 4096 characters.

Why does Analytics not show views for a Telegram post?

Telegram tells Postia how many members a channel has and nothing more. It never says how many people saw one particular post, so Postia leaves that blank rather than inventing a number.

Can a Telegram channel feed my other networks by itself?

Yes. A crosspost rule can watch it and send what appears there on to your other channels.

Telegram tells Postia the moment something is posted, so it goes on at once. Between two Telegram channels a rule can forward the original instead of sending a copy.

Leave the bot an administrator of the channel — it stops seeing posts the moment it is removed.

Other networks

Every network is on every plan, the free one included, and the first 14 days come with all of Studio.

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