Telegram welcome message example, for every place a greeting lands

By Mara Vogel Published 27 October 2026 18 min read

Most welcome message lists are written as if every greeting lands in the same place. A greeting does not. A line that works as a pinned channel post reads oddly as a bot's /start reply, and a group greeting that tags the newcomer by name cannot be sent to a channel subscriber, because a channel shows its readers nobody's arrival.

This guide is organised by surface: group, channel, join request, bot chat and private chat. Each section says what triggers the greeting, who sees it and what Telegram documents about it, and the copy-ready telegram welcome message example set further down gives one template per surface. Replies to messages people send are a different job, covered in the guide to Telegram auto reply. This page is about joins.

Where can a Telegram welcome message appear?

A Telegram welcome message can appear in six places: the native greeting in a group, a bot's greeting in a group, the native greeting in a channel, a private chat a bot opens with someone who asked to join, a bot's own chat after the person presses Start, and a private chat with a Premium account that uses a Business greeting. Each surface has its own trigger and its own audience.

"When a user joins, only they can see the message."Telegram blog, Welcome Messages, 25 August 2026

That sentence from Telegram's announcement changed the advice on this topic. Before the August 2026 update, a greeting for new group members meant adding a bot, and several ranking guides still open with that step. Older guides also say a channel cannot greet subscribers, which stopped being true on the same date.

How to set welcome message in Telegram group

To set a welcome message in a Telegram group, open the group's profile, tap Edit, choose Welcome Message and send the text or media new members should see. Telegram's 25 August 2026 announcement says no bot is required and that only the person who joins sees the greeting, so the group history stays free of greetings for everyone else.

1. Open the group profile

   Tap the group name at the top of the chat. You need to be the owner, or an admin holding the right to manage welcome messages.

2. Choose Edit, then Welcome Message

   Telegram's own instruction reads: open the group's profile "and select Edit > Welcome Message". If the option is missing, update the app; the feature arrived in the August 2026 release.

3. Send the greeting

   Every message sent in that composer becomes part of the welcome pack. The announcement says several messages and media can be added, with rich formatting that includes tables.

4. Test it from a second account

   Join from a spare account and read what a newcomer sees. A greeting that looked short in the editor can fill a phone screen once media loads.

Which welcome message Telegram shows natively, and to whom

The native greeting is a private pack: Telegram shows it only to the member who joined, so a busy group's history never fills with greetings. Bot API 10.3, released on 24 August 2026, added an administrator right called can_send_welcome_messages, defined as the right to "manage chat welcome messages or directly send them in the case of bots". An owner can hand the greeting to one admin without granting wider settings rights.

The native welcome message has three gaps. Telegram's announcement mentions no name placeholder, so the greeting cannot address a member by name. It is not a verification step, so spam accounts read it and post anyway. And it does not remove the "joined the group" service line. Those three gaps are why group bots still get added.

A good welcome message for Telegram group members answers three questions: what the group is for, what to do first, and where the rules live. A telegram group welcome message that pastes the full rulebook gets skipped; put the rules in a pinned post or a dedicated Telegram group rules message and link to it from the greeting.

Telegram group welcome bot: Rose, Group Help or your own

A telegram group welcome bot posts a public greeting each time someone joins, can call the newcomer by name, and can pair the greeting with a CAPTCHA or a rules button. Rose and Group Help are the ready-made bots most guides name. Both have to be added as group admins, and both learn about joins from the service message Telegram delivers to every bot in the group.

How to add welcome bot in Telegram group chats is the same for any bot: open the group, tap Add Members, search the bot's username, add it, then promote it to admin with the right to delete messages so it can clean up after itself. Telegram's Bot Features page states that bots run in Privacy Mode by default, yet "All service messages" still reach them, and the join notice is a service message. Searching "welcome bot telegram" returns mostly GitHub repositories and bot directories, so the two established bots below are a safer starting point than an unmaintained script.

How to set welcome message in Telegram Rose bot

Rose's documentation gives four commands. /welcome on enables greetings. /setwelcome followed by text sets the message, and Rose fills placeholders such as {first} (first name), {mention}, {chatname} and {rules}, which creates a button to the group's rules. /welcome noformat prints the raw text for editing, and /resetwelcome returns to Rose's default greeting.

A rose bot telegram welcome message stacks up fast in an active group, so Rose has a cleanup switch. With /cleanwelcome on, Rose deletes its previous greeting when a new user joins or after 5 minutes, which Rose's documentation says leaves "only one greeting message in your chat". The same page says the 5-minute window cannot be changed because it is a compromise with Telegram's rate limits. Rose is a third-party bot run by its own operators, not by Telegram; if Rose changes or goes offline, the greeting goes with it.

Group help bot telegram welcome message settings

Group Help's own site says to add the bot as an administrator and configure it with /settings, where the welcome message sits beside the group's other moderation modules. Group Help's public pages do not document its placeholder list or its free and paid split in a form this guide could verify, so run /help inside your group before writing a template that depends on a variable. Comparison pages from rival bots describe Group Help's paid tier, but those are a competitor's claims.

What is the best Telegram welcome bot?

The best telegram welcome bot is the one that matches the job. No bot at all suits a private greeting. Rose suits a free public greeting with CAPTCHA and cleanup. Group Help suits an admin who wants every setting in menus. A custom bot suits a greeting that must read from your own database, such as a course roster or a paid-member list. Any telegram welcome bot that greets publicly adds one message per join, so cleanup matters more than wording in a group that grows fast.

How to set welcome message in Telegram channel

To set a welcome message in a Telegram channel, use the same native setting as a group: open the channel profile, tap Edit and choose Welcome Message. Telegram's August 2026 announcement covers "your group or channel", and only the new subscriber sees the greeting. Before that update a channel had no greeting surface at all, because a channel shows no join line to its readers.

A telegram channel welcome message works alongside three older surfaces. The pinned post is what a new subscriber meets when opening the channel. The channel description is what a visitor reads before joining, and it is also the text directories copy into their listings, as the guide on what each Telegram directory sells shows. The third is the join request.

If a channel's invite link requires admin approval, a bot holding the can_invite_users right receives a chat_join_request update. The Bot API's ChatJoinRequest object includes a user_chat_id, and the documentation says "The bot can use this identifier for 5 minutes to send messages until the join request is processed". That window is the only documented case of a bot opening a private chat with someone who never pressed Start, and it closes once an admin decides or another admin contacts the applicant.

A welcome message for telegram channel subscribers should say what gets posted, how often, and which post to read first; the channel row in the telegram welcome message example table below follows that order. A greeting keeps new subscribers oriented; it does not bring them in, which is the job covered in growing Telegram subscribers. If the channel runs paid ads, the welcome pack is the first thing an ad click meets, so it should repeat the promise the Telegram promotion made.

Telegram bot welcome message: the /start reply

A telegram bot welcome message is the reply a bot sends when someone opens it and presses Start, which delivers the /start command. Before that tap, the person sees the bot's description, which BotFather's /setdescription sets as "short text up to 512 characters" shown under the title "What can this bot do?". After the tap, the bot's own code decides what the greeting says.

Deep links let one bot greet people differently by source. Telegram's Bot Features page gives the format t.me/your_bot?start=airplane, which delivers /start airplane to the bot. A bot that receives /start channel_ad can open with the offer from the ad, while /start support opens with the help menu.

Private chats: the Business greeting message

In private chats, a welcome message is Telegram Business's greeting message, which Telegram's March 2024 announcement describes as "sent to users who contact you for the first time". The greeting goes out from your own account, needs Telegram Premium, and repeats only after a quiet period: the Business API's no_activity_days value sets how long a chat must be inactive before the greeting fires again.

The API lets the greeting target new chats, existing chats, contacts or non-contacts, and exclude chosen people. A greeting answers an incoming message; it never sends on a timer. For posts at a set hour, scheduled messages are the tool, and away messages and keyword replies belong to auto reply. The Business row in the telegram welcome message example set below keeps the greeting to three sentences, because the person is waiting for a real answer.

Telegram welcome message example set, one per surface

Each telegram welcome message example below is written for one surface and its limits. The group versions assume the member can already read the chat. The channel version assumes the subscriber reads it once and scrolls on. The bot version assumes the person pressed Start a second ago. Replace the bracketed parts, and keep placeholders only where the tool supports them.

Telegram welcome message template rules

A telegram welcome message template earns its place by producing one action, not by sounding friendly. Four rules cover most of it:

• One first step. "Read the pinned guide" beats a list of six links.
• Rules by link, not by paste, because a newcomer reads the greeting once.
• A stated way out on any bot that will message again, such as /stop.
• No promise the surface cannot keep; a join-request message that says "reply within the hour" breaks once the 5-minute window has passed and an admin is asleep.

Test every telegram welcome message example from a second account on a phone. The editor preview hides how media and buttons wrap on a small screen.

How to create a welcome bot on Telegram group chats yourself

To create your own welcome bot, register a bot with @BotFather, add it to the group as an admin, listen for joins, and send or delete messages through the Bot API. The code is small; the limits decide the design: a stated cap of 20 messages per minute per group, a 48-hour deletion window, and member updates that only an admin bot receives.

How to create welcome bot in Telegram group setups that survive a busy week comes down to six steps:

1. Register the bot

   @BotFather issues the token. Set the description and about text at the same time, because the people who tap through from the group see them first.

2. Add it as an admin

   Grant the delete-messages right. The Bot API's chat_member update is only sent if "the bot must be an administrator in the chat" and lists chat_member in allowed_updates.

3. Pick the join signal

   The new_chat_members field on a service message arrives even in Privacy Mode. The chat_member update reports every status change, including leaves and bans, and suits a bot that also tracks who left.

4. Send the greeting

   A normal sendMessage greets in public. An ephemeral message, sent with ephemeral_message_parameters, is visible only to the newcomer and the bot; the Bot API warns "It is not guaranteed that the user will receive the message, especially if they are offline."

5. Delete the previous greeting

   Store each greeting's message ID and delete it when the next member arrives. The Bot API states: "A message can only be deleted if it was sent less than 48 hours ago."

6. Batch greetings when joins spike

   When 60 accounts join in one minute, one greeting each would breach the group cap three times over. Greet the batch in one message per interval and honour retry_after on any HTTP 429.

What a welcome bot cannot do

A welcome bot cannot message a new member privately unless that person has already started the bot, or asked to join through an approval link and is still inside the 5-minute window. Telegram's bot introduction states that bots can't start conversations with users. Every tool that advertises private welcome DMs to all new members either reaches only members who pressed Start, or runs on a personal account rather than a bot.

The personal-account route is a cold DM under another name. The tool reads the member list, often through a member scraper, and messages each joiner from a phone-number account. Telegram's Terms of Service bar using the service to send spam, and the documented limits on mass DMs show why such accounts get restricted. People who limit incoming messages, the setting covered in the mutual contacts only guide, never receive the greeting at all.

A welcome bot also cannot add anyone to the group; there is no add-member method, which the guide on invite member bots explains, and adding Telegram members covers the manual routes. A greeting posted by a fleet of accounts posing as members is a shill bot, not a welcome bot. Nor can a moderation bot report the spam joiners it catches, since Telegram keeps reporting user-only, as the page on mass report bot claims shows.

Consent rules sit above all of this. Laws on commercial messages are set by the recipient's country and apply whatever a platform allows, so a greeting that turns into weekly offers needs its own opt-in. This guide is not legal advice. Sendhaus builds greeting and onboarding flows as part of bots and automation work.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Telegram blog, Welcome Messages, 25 August 2026 — native welcome messages for groups and channels, Edit > Welcome Message, visibility to the new member only.
• Telegram Bot API — can_send_welcome_messages (Bot API 10.3), new_chat_members, chat_member, chat_join_request and the 5-minute user_chat_id wording, ephemeral messages, and the 48-hour deletion limit. Read 27 October 2026.
• Telegram Bot Features — Privacy Mode and service messages, ephemeral messages, deep links, BotFather description limits.
• Telegram Bots FAQ — one message per second per chat, 20 messages per minute per group, 429 errors.
• Telegram Bot Platform introduction — bots cannot start conversations with users.
• Telegram blog, Telegram Business, 31 March 2024 and Telegram API, Business — greeting messages, no_activity_days, recipient filters.
• MissRose documentation, Welcomes and Advanced Greeting Settings — /setwelcome, placeholders, /cleanwelcome and the 5-minute rule.
• Group Help Bot site — admin setup and /settings.
• Telegram Terms of Service — the spam clause.