Telegram Emerges As Top Platform For Business Promotion

Telegram has become the leading platform for business promotion in Russia, according to research by Magnetto.pro. A survey of 632 business representatives, including CMOs, marketers, and company owners, revealed that 66.9% of companies use Telegram for advertising, outpacing other platforms like Yandex Direct (55.65%) and VKontakte (48.7%).

Advertising Trends On Telegram

The study highlighted two primary approaches to advertising on Telegram:

  • Telegram Ads: Preferred by 54.5% of respondents, this format is widely used by industries like Education, Construction and Real Estate, Finance, E-Commerce, IT, and Telecommunications.
  • Seeding: Chosen by 51.2% of respondents, seeding is popular in sectors such as Manufacturing, Finance, IT, and Retail.

Popular Advertising Formats

Key objects of promotion differ between Telegram Ads and seeding:

  • Telegram Ads:
    • Websites (71.8%)
    • Telegram channels (57.4%)
    • Chatbots (45.5%)
  • Seeding:
    • Websites (68.6%)
    • Telegram channels (59.2%)
    • Events (36.1%)

Advertising Budgets

Most companies allocate moderate budgets for Telegram advertising:

  • 36.1% spend between 150,000 and 500,000 rubles per month.
  • 3% dedicate over 1 million rubles monthly to promotions.

The Shift To Telegram

Telegram’s rise as the preferred advertising platform reflects its versatility and growing reach. The platform’s tools cater to a wide range of business needs, from brand awareness to direct customer interaction.

This trend aligns with broader changes in Russia’s digital advertising landscape, as noted in a recent Brand Analytics study, which documented significant growth in the country’s social media audiences.

Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.