Growing
How to broadcast a message to all your Telegram bot users
By the Botable team
Broadcasting means sending to every stored user id, paced under Telegram's rate limits, with progress saved so a crash resumes rather than restarts. Blocked users return an error you should use to prune your list.
Watch it
Writing a message to everyone who has used your bot: composing it, sending a test to yourself first, and reading the delivery result once it goes out.
Read the transcript
Everything said in the video, in order.
A broadcast is one message sent to everybody who has ever written to your bot. It is the loudest thing this product does, and the screen is built accordingly.
Botable draws it as the Telegram bubble it will become, and gives you a way to send it to yourself before it goes to anyone else.
Broadcast sits low in the Manage rail, under the audience it will go to. Its line says whether anything is queued or already on its way.
This is not a form with a preview beside it — the chat window is the form. Same wallpaper, same avatar, same bubble your reader gets in Telegram.
Every keystroke redraws the bubble. The token in the toolbar drops a placeholder wherever the cursor is.
When it sends, every copy carries that person's own first name. Telegram does not always supply one, and where it is missing Botable writes there.
Telegram accepts a short list of tags and refuses the rest. The toolbar produces exactly that list — bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and links.
Anything the browser adds on its own is stripped before the message leaves. One unknown tag and Telegram refuses the whole send.
A broadcast can carry tappable links. Each takes a caption and a URL, and appears under the bubble the moment both are filled.
Six is the limit, and each sits on its own row. A bare domain is fine — the https goes on the front before Telegram sees it.
The counter is Telegram's ceiling, not ours — four thousand and ninety six characters. Attach an image and it drops to one thousand and twenty four, because the text becomes a caption.
Underneath is the one control worth using every time. Send a test to yourself puts the finished message in your own Telegram first.
Give it your username or your numeric ID and it sends the real thing — same formatting, same buttons. You have to have messaged the bot once, because a bot cannot open a chat with you.
The send button carries the number it will reach and asks once more before it goes, because there is no unsending a broadcast.
Write it, look at the bubble, send it to yourself, then send it to everyone. Start free at botable dot I O.
The short version
Broadcasting from a Telegram bot is a queue problem wearing a marketing hat. You hold a list of user ids and must send to each without exceeding Telegram's rate limits, which means a paced worker rather than a loop, a broadcast to a few thousand users is minutes of work, not an instant operation. Three things separate a broadcast that works from one that causes a support incident. Progress must be persisted per recipient, so a crash halfway resumes rather than starting again and double-messaging everyone who already received it. Failures must be classified: a user who blocked the bot returns a specific error, and that user should be marked inactive rather than retried forever. And consent has to come first, because a bot that broadcasts to people who only ever used one command will be blocked and reported, which damages deliverability in a way no pacing strategy recovers.
Step by step
Who should receive a broadcast?
People who opted into one. Interacting with a bot once is not consent to be messaged later, and treating it as such produces blocks and reports. An explicit subscribe, or a clear notice at first use, costs a little reach and protects the channel.
How do you pace the sends?
A worker that respects Telegram's per-chat and aggregate limits, with a small delay between sends. On a 429, wait exactly the retry-after and continue. Plan for a large broadcast to take minutes and design the interface so nobody expects otherwise.
How do you make it resumable?
Record the outcome per recipient as you go, sent, failed, blocked, rather than tracking a single position. A crash then resumes precisely, and the record doubles as the delivery report you will want afterwards.
What do you do with failures?
Distinguish them. A block is permanent: mark the user inactive and stop sending. A rate limit is temporary: retry after the delay. A transient network error is worth one retry. Treating all three the same means either retrying blocked users forever or dropping people over a blip.
What catches people out
- A single position marker instead of per-recipient status means a crash re-sends to everyone already done
- Blocked users are permanent failures, retrying them forever wastes your entire rate budget
- Broadcasting without consent produces blocks and reports, and neither is recoverable
Questions
How long does a broadcast to 10,000 users take?
Minutes, under Telegram's limits. That is normal and not a fault to engineer around. Show progress in your admin interface so nobody assumes it has hung and starts it again.
Can I segment a broadcast?
Yes, and you should, by activity, by language, by whatever you store. A smaller, relevant send produces fewer blocks than a large generic one, and blocks are the expensive outcome.
Want a bot that does this?
Describe it in plain language and Botable writes the code, gives the bot its own database, deploys it and keeps it running. Everything on this page is handled for you, the token, the webhook, the storage, the hosting.
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- Bot analyticstelegram bot analytics