How to Use Telegram

Key Takeaways

hey everyone in today's video i want to show you how to use the telegram messenger app and telegram is completely free it's a cloud-based messenger meaning you could use it on your phone on your android or iphone and you could use it on the computer for mac or pc at the same time and it syncs between all those different devices your message syncs that way so that's a little bit different than some other apps that you may be used to and telegram has been around for some time it was created back in 2013 and you could download telegram from their website at telegram.org you could also look for it in the google play store if you have an android phone or the apple store if you have an iphone or ipad and as you can see for a computer it's available over here as well and on this website at telegram.org you could read more about it but i'm going to cover some of the features of telegram in this video and i'll compare it to some other apps too in this process if you have any questions that i don't cover in this video they have a frequently asked questions section on their website and it's very very complete i went through this it shows you everything about telegrams privacy security ownership how they make money history and every little tiny thing you could do with the app is covered here so i'll cover the basics if you're a beginner to it and then this will be a really good resource for more things that i don't cover so look for telegram on your android device or your iphone device and i'm going to download and open it and it is going to ask you for a phone number to sign in because it has to send you a sms a text message to verify your account now it's not going to use this phone number to send messages it's going to use wi-fi it's cloud-based but you do have to link it to a phone number this becomes the way you sign into your account on other devices too so pick your country put in your phone number it will send you a sms code as i mentioned type that in here and on this page type in your first and last name and then add a profile picture if you like here now you could give it access to contacts then you will know which one of your contacts already has telegram makes it a lot easier i'll agree to that and here we are inside of telegram and it's really simple to use on the bottom you have your contacts you have your chats where we're going to initiate our conversation and settings let's go through making our first chat first all you have to do is come up here press this icon right here and this is what you'll see here you'll see your contact list over here and all your friends that have telegram that are already on your phone in your contact up here you could search for that person and there are three different things you could do here let me explain these here you could create a new group now i should mention what groups are they're basically just more than a one-on-one conversation but groups are really designed for conversations with family members friends and small teams now they can be as large as 200 000 members in a group but if you really are trying to do something big like that you should create something called the channel which we'll get to in a second then under that you could create a new contact that you don't see on your contacts so you could click this and it's going to ask you again for their phone number here and then you could type in their first and last name and create a new contact through that and then if they don't have telegram you could send them an invite and you could create a new channel which we'll get to at the end basically a new channel is a public way to broadcast your message to an unlimited audience that's what a channel is very unique to telegram it's not something that you have in other messaging platforms so this is why this is more considered a social media platform than a messaging platform so let's go ahead and type in a new contact and send them an invite i'll type in their name here and i'll type in their number to send them an invite so if they're not on telegram this is what ends up happening you're gonna get this page where it says invite to telegram i'll click that and it basically just creates this message for them and i could just send it as a regular message on iphone if you're using imessage it won't be considered a text message but on other other platforms it's going to be just a regular sms message and when they join telegram it's going to say that they join telegram this is if they don't have telegram already you have to go through this invite process now let's go ahead and click this and let's start a conversation now multiple different things you could do on these one-on-one conversations the group chat also becomes identical to this once you create a group let's start by sending a message to send a message you just click this box here and type out your message here and it's just like any other messaging platform you just have to press this arrow to send that message very very simple when it comes to this option right here let's go ahead and attach something to attach a message click this paper clip icon give it access to your photos if you want to send a photo or don't allow a photo if you don't want to send a photo so i'll select the photo to give access to and i give it access to a photo you could give it access to a camera you could send photos and videos this way you could send files you could share your location and share someone else's contact so if i send a picture i could just click it here and i have some options i could crop it differently here if i like you could see that over here rotate it you could go ahead and press this option to flip it and you could go ahead and change the aspect ratio of any any picture here to any of these that's available on every picture press the check mark and press the send option right here and it will send that picture to that person so they send me a message so this is my message to them this is their message back and this is my message to them with the picture you could press this option here that lets you send these type of stickers here and you have the gif option over here that you could send using any one of these gifs available in the app and you have emojis available here as well i could send this one for example as a gif and you still have your keyboard emoji too if you want to send any emojis like that here i could go ahead and send that you also could give it access to a microphone press to record a audio if i select that again it says press to record a video so to record audio it's asking me to access my microphone and i have to go to settings to turn on both camera and microphone here in order to do that but once i do i could just press and hold here and it's recording a voice chat and as soon as i let go you could see a voice chat over here they could go ahead and press play on it and it would play the voice chat for that person you could see it up there now let me show you some settings that you need to know about if you click that person's profile icon right here it will bring you to this page where you could start a call and a video call right over here for example i'll do an audio call if you press this right here it starts an audio call with that person it's ringing for them i could go ahead and put myself on mute i could go ahead and turn my camera right here and it will ask me to switch it to a video call and now we're inside of a video call i could go ahead and flip my camera mute it or go ahead and turn off my camera to come back to an audio call let me go ahead and hang up right here just press end call and it's going to bring you back to this page now all the media that you use with the person in one-on-one conversation shows up over here but any of these you could press and hold down and you have an option here to delete it or see it in chat and it brings you back to that portion of your chat with that person now if i go back to the home page under chats you could see all my recent conversations that took place here i could always slide left on these and archive them or delete them so this one was just archived but you do have that option you could also hide them from the archive so now it's completely gone and telegram has this other options called secret messages that are end-to-end encrypted messages let me show you how to turn that on inside of any conversation press the person's profile icon so here i'll press the profile icon right here it brings me to this page and if i press the more option here you could see something called the secret chat i could press this and it says do you want to start a secret chat and this is a end-to-end encrypted conversation between two people it does not leave any traces on the server it has a self-destruct timer and there's no forwarding option available here so if i type out text here and you could see the self destruct icon i could click it and i could set a timer so i could set five seconds press send here and as soon as i press send you can see this message will self-destruct in five seconds as soon as the other person reads that message now to create a group press the same icon and this time choose new group and it says 200 000 is the number of people that could be in this group so you could add any of the people that you see over here by just pressing the check mark next to their name and creating a group that way and everything inside the group works the same way as i showed you with individual messages now what about channels same thing press this icon press new channel now channels are different than groups so let's go ahead and create a channel this lets you broadcast the message to unlimited audiences i'll name my channel here add a description if you like press next you could also add a profile picture and typically channels will be public you could make them private though if you like and only people with this link could join this channel i'll leave mine on public here and i could go ahead and create a link over here so i'll create my link and it's available and i could press next and press ok and here i could add anyone from my contact so i'll add just one person and here we go now we're inside of a channel it does look like a group it does look like an individual message but you're not broadcasting to a place that is public other people could join this as well with that link and you have this bell icon now you could make sure that members don't receive a notification or receive a notification when a post is created here so i could go ahead and put a post here press it and it's going to create a post just like this and other members in here will see it now to invite members to this all i have to do is press this icon right here and i could go ahead and share this link with them and they could go ahead and join and you could see the number of subscribers over here you could also search within that channel over here and when you go back to the chat window the channels and the groups and individual messages will all show up here on individual lines now one of the useful things with telegram too is you could create a username for yourself and share that username instead of a phone number so people could find you that way let me show you that here you could go to settings and right here you could set a photo or video as your profile but you could also set a username click this and you could create a username and it says people will be able to find you this way instead of using your phone number so go ahead and set that up if you like to do that instead telegram on their appearances as well has a lot of options to customize this app that i found really useful like the way your text messages show that's going to be available over here a bunch of different colors and options to choose from even app icon could be changed here from the default to the classic versions here even your chat background could be something besides this solid black background look at all these different options you have so very very customizable app over here and i'm going to put a link in the description to an article that mashable wrote that compares telegram to signal and whatsapp and messenger as far as security and privacy go which one is end-to-end encrypted for example on private phone calls or group calls all of that is explained there and it's really very well researched so make sure you check that out when you get a chance i hope you found this video useful please give it a thumbs up subscribe for easy to follow app videos just like this one check out the other videos i have on signal whatsapp and messenger to compare your options and i hope to see you next time