How to track competitors in Telegram channels without reading them every day

Banks, fintech companies and regulators announce things about themselves on Telegram first: a new deposit, a pricing change, a board appointment. Industry and business channels add deals, fines and revoked licences. To know what five competitors are doing, you end up reading thirty or forty channels every day — and remembering who launched what last week.

People usually handle this in one of two ways. The first is to read everything and keep a spreadsheet by hand; it goes stale the day its author takes a holiday. The second is to search by company name; then you get every mention, ads and reposts included, and you miss the event where a competitor is referred to by a product name.

Radar in Gista works differently: you give it channels, and it finds the companies, people and events on its own.

You add the channels, the entities are found for you

In the Radar section you create a radar and add public Telegram channels — by @name or link, several at once if you like. These can be your competitors' own channels, industry outlets, business media, regulators' channels.

Gista then goes through the posts in those channels from the last 14 days and finds the companies, people, government bodies, organisations and products mentioned in them. You don't type names in: in the list of entities found, you mark the ones you want to follow. The first entities show up while the processing is still running, and the list keeps growing on its own.

If a company you need isn't in the list, the channels you added haven't written about it in the past two weeks. That's a cue to add the channels that do.

Events are sorted by type

The Analytics tab shows what has happened to each entity you follow: a new product, pricing, a partnership, a funding round, a management change, a fine, a licence, a regulator's decision, and other types. Every event links to its source post, so you can check it in one click.

The same data comes in several views:

• Columnar — events one by one: when, who, what type, the headline and the source.
• Summary — an "entities × event types" table with counts: you see at once who was more active, and in what.
• Matrix — the same table with the posts themselves in the cells.
• Timeline — events by day.

One story retold by ten channels counts as one event, not ten.

Next to it is the "What channels write about" tab: topics, newsmakers with the sentiment of mentions, a story map, and a comparison of the channels themselves — who reports first and who writes without citing a source.

An entity doesn't have to be a company

Radar finds everyone your channels write about: agencies, executives, public figures, organisations. A PR agency can keep a separate radar per client — the client itself, its competitors and the people at the top. For an agency or an executive the set of event types is different: statements, appointments, decisions, inspections.

What Radar doesn't do

• It doesn't send messages. Radar is a dashboard on the site. If you need to hear about a mention in Telegram within minutes, that's what Media monitoring is for; the two work together.
• It reads public Telegram channels only. Not private channels, chats, websites or other social networks.
• Posts are labelled by a language model. It is rarely wrong, but it can be: it may assign an event to the wrong type or the wrong entity. That's why every event carries a link to the original post.
• Collection pauses if you don't open your dashboard for 30 days. One button resumes it with the same set of channels.

See it before you sign up

Radar on live data is open without an account: the live demo is built on fintech channels from Russia and Uzbekistan and is updated every hour. It has the same views and the same event types your own radar will have — only the channels are chosen by us.

To build a radar on your own channels, start for free. It's free while the product is in beta.