How to build a look-alike audience in Telegram
Telegram has no ad platform with look-alike targeting — but it has an honest equivalent: people active in several communities of one niche at once. That is the hot core, an audience with confirmed interest. You can collect it in a single run, or build it manually for finer control.
The idea: intersection instead of an algorithm
One topical community means interest. Two or three communities in the same niche mean sustained interest: the person deliberately surrounds themselves with the topic.
The fast route: the look-alike tool
Point at one sample channel — the service does the rest: it takes similar communities from Telegram's recommendations, collects the reachable audience of each — comment authors for channels, active message authors of the last month for chats — and keeps those who appear in several at once. No joining required; open discussions are read.
When the tool returns nothing
Telegram recommendations are not available for every channel: if none were found for your seed, the run honestly returns zero rows with an explanation — pick another channel in the niche. Focused topical channels work best, not giant news channels.
Two settings that decide everything
The 'active in N+ communities' threshold sets the density of the core: 2 is broader, 4 is tighter and smaller. The number of similar communities (from 4 to 10) is an upper bound: some communities drop out as too general or without open discussions, so the report states how many communities actually contributed. A high threshold with few contributing communities may yield no intersections — lower the threshold then.
The manual route: when you want full control
If you would rather pick the communities yourself than trust recommendations: find niche chats through keyword search, collect the audience of each, and build an intersection in the 'Databases and merging' section. Same idea, but you control the list of sources.
What to do with the core
The core is usually several times smaller than the source bases — that is the point. Export to Excel and use it for targeting through official ad platforms or for picking communities for seeding posts.