On December 17, telecommunications companies cut off access to WhatsApp in Brazil after the company did not comply with police wiretapping requests. Many of the app’s estimated 100 million users went in search of an alternative, landing on Telegram, WhatsApp’s rival messaging app. Telegram gained 5.7 million new users in one day as a result of the 48-hr blackout.
Incidents like this offer Telegram an opportunity to chip away at WhatsApp’s dominant marketshare. As of May 2015, the app reported 62 million monthly active users. If you are looking to prioritize and increase mobile traffic on your blog, this is one service you can’t afford to ignore.
Telegram Sharing Button for Jetpack is a plugin that gives mobile readers the ability to send content from your site to Telegram users on any platform, including Android, iPhone, Windows, and desktop clients for Mac, PC, and Linux. The plugin was created by Brazilian WordPress developer Valerio Souza, who is also the the author of the WhatsApp Sharing Button for Jetpack.
After activating the plugin, if you’re already using Jetpack’s sharing module, you can visit the settings page to drag the Telegram icon into the enabled services section. The new Telegram sharing button will not appear on the desktop version of your site. You will need to test it by visiting a post from a mobile device.
The only complaint I have is that the white circle around the icon makes it look somewhat out of place among the other icons that share a simpler design. The icon’s resolution also needs to be improved for retina displays. Other than that, everything looks and works as advertised when sharing a post to Telegram.
If you haven’t recently taken inventory of your Jetpack sharing buttons, you may want to review your most popular content to see what services readers are using to share your posts. Depending on the demographics of your site’s visitors, both the WhatsApp and Telegram sharing buttons may be more beneficial than the “Email,” “Google+,” or “Print” buttons, for example. These could be hidden behind the share button. As groups and channels become more common on mobile messaging apps, prominently displaying sharing buttons for these services may help your posts travel faster and further than any kind of search engine optimization.
Both the Telegram and WhatsApp Sharing buttons for Jetpack can be downloaded for free from the WordPress.org plugin directory.