Crypto Community Management Apps Face-Off: Discord vs Telegram

Engaging your audiences on your Telegram and Discord channel or group is a crucial part of crypto community management. Both the messenger apps are favoured by the crypto community and offer the opportunity to personalize interaction between you and your supporters. Telegram is the older contender in this case being launched in 2013. Its privacy feature that allows users to remain anonymous is what drew the crypto community to Telegram. So, when it comes to crypto community management, Telegram is a platform you must tap into as it is more popular. 

Discord, a voice and messenger app launched in 2015, was ideally designed for the gaming community. Today, however, the crypto community also sees Discord as an ideal platform to engage owing to its highly scalable and customizable interface. Besides, games form a huge part of the DeFi space today, so no wonder Discord has become a strong competitor of Telegram. Understanding the various functionalities of Discord is, therefore, also important while planning an effective crypto community management strategy. 

The next question you are probably asking is which of these crypto community management apps is better for your business. As experts in crypto community management, having assisted many crypto businesses scale their Telegram and Discord channels, we feel both have something very distinct to offer. Here is a sweeping view of the key differences between discord and Telegram. 

Discord and Telegram: Key Differences 

We will cover more on the features unique to Telegram and Discord and how you can use them to strategize a kickass crypto community management plan, but first let’s talk about some of the common factors. 

Telegram and Discord: Similarities 

• Both are messenger apps where you can create public communities. 

• Your channels can have unlimited subscribers on both Telegram and Discord. 

• Both apps are breeding grounds for crypto enthusiasts. 

• Telegram and Discord are compatible with any device and both have web and mobile apps for IOS and Android users.
• Both support options for video calls and screen sharing.
• You can use bots on both these platforms to automate processes. You can also use moderation bots to protect your community from spammers. 

Telegram Community vs Discord Servers: The Basic Difference

There are two types of crypto communities you can create on Telegram – a group and a channel. So, what is the difference between a Telegram group and a Telegram channel? A Telegram group can have up to 200,000 members. A crypto telegram public group is ideal for you if your agenda is to interact with your audience. To have people join, you must promote your Telegram group through various marketing strategies. Some of the features of a Telegram  group are: 

• It is an open platform where everyone can see each other. Group admins can of course restrict messages from members, but that beats the purpose of a group. 
• The crypto community on Telegram often likes to engage in groups because it allows one-on-one interaction. 

• You can’t track the number of people who view your messages in a Telegram group. 

• A new member can see the entire chat history of a Telegram group, however, you can also disable the chat history feature on Telegram if that’s something you want. 

• A group cannot hold more than 200,000 members. 

Apart from a group, you can also engage the crypto community on Telegram by creating a channel. A channel can have an unlimited number of subscribers and works as a platform for one-way broadcast messages. Subscribers cannot see other members and you can track the number of views on your messages on a Telegram channel. 

Can you run a Telegram group and a channel at the same time? Yes, in fact it is a practice you should follow and you can link your group to your Telegram channel. This way anything you post on your Channel would automatically get reposted on your group. 

It’s a good practice for a new crypto business to manage a crypto community on Telegram via a group. After all, everyone wants to feel connected to your product and get heard. A Telegram group drives engagement. To protect your group from spammers, you can use Telegram moderation bots that are designed to detect and prevent spamming. 

In conjunction with a group, you can create a channel as well which you can use to make announcements, share educational content etc. Creating a Telegram channel is an important part of crypto community management as it could be a means to establishing your authority. A Telegram channel could be a go-to for your audiences to find information around product updates, contests, benefits and general knowledge. Telegram’s algorithm ranks channels based on the number of subscribers they have, so marketing your Telegram channel is something you must do proactively. 

Members often complain about getting too many notifications from groups. For both Telegram groups and channels, you can send silent messages to make sure your subscribers are not bludgeoned with notifications all day. 

Discord Servers: How are they Different from Telegram Channels? 

Let’s say, you want to be a part of a large group of people with whom you share similar interests and with whom you would like to engage in real-time. Your natural inclination would be to join an online group of likeminded people. For example, if you are into crypto trading, you would join a group of active crypto traders. 

There’s one problem here though. With so many conversations happening at the same time you can feel overwhelmed very quickly. This is a problem with Telegram. It just gets messy after a while.  Discord, on the other hand, offers an intuitive interface having more features to streamline communication. This has led to the popularity of Discord and the crypto community has also followed suit. As a crypto business you would find a lot of crypto/DeFi projects managing their crypto community on Discord for this very reason. 

Server is to Discord as groups and channels are to Telegram, but a Discord Server works differently than Telegram groups. The best thing about Discord servers is they can be organized according to personal preferences. This means you can create different channels within a single server and categorize them by themes and topics, a lot like channels on Slack. In short you can create multiple categories for the kind of interaction you want to hold with your audience and create new channels within each category. A Discord server can have a maximum of 500 channels with no limit on the number of users. 

Setting Permissions 

This is one more function that gives Discord an upper hand over Telegram, setting up permissions. Within a server, you can create roles for specific members. For example, you can select moderators or administrators to help maintain the integrity of a specific channel. You don’t want to give access to all the features of a channel to everyone? Well, you can customize that too.

With Discord you can incentivize your star users and provide them the chance to become a high-ranking member within the community. It’s only natural for channels with thousands of members to become cluttered after a while and an important update may get lost in the noise. To make sure that doesn’t happen, Discord has an option to rank comments based on their level of importance. 

In short Discord offers the in-built mechanisms to regulate user behavior in channels and groups, something missing in Telegram. All you need to do is create a blueprint of your crypto community management strategy designed for Discord to become a hit. It’s all in the planning. 

Final Thoughts: Who Wins the Battle? 

When it comes to data privacy and maintaining anonymity, Telegram is the clear winner and this is a top reason why so many crypto fans gather on this platform. With features like secret chats that can happen outside Telegram’s main server and self-destructing messaging, Telegram offers an opportunity to a large number of crypto users from countries where cryptocurrencies are banned. Also, the ability to share large files is something that could be considered an added advantage. 

These are some of the functionality that you won’t find on Discord, but Discord has something else. It’s a way better tool for managing a crypto community. Crypto enthusiasts flock to Discord crypto channels to have meaningful, coherent conversations without worrying about spam attacks. Plus, Discord is a very good platform for the DeFi play-to-earn and the NFT space because of its primary association with the gaming community. 

So who wins the battle? Well, we would say both. If you want your crypto community management to be a successful venture, you must take advantage of both the platforms. Blockwiz is a crypto marketing firm that has helped many crypto businesses build successful communities on Telegram and Discord. Looking for suggestions to plan your own crypto community? Why not hit us up?