If your MENA market entry plan starts and ends with Google, Meta, and TikTok, you may be missing a major regional audience. Telegram now has more than 1 billion monthly active users worldwide, and MENA accounts for more than 11.2% of that audience. For brands, this reach delivers far more than awareness: Telegram advertising can drive app installs, qualified leads, registrations, sales, channel growth, bot sign-ups, and repeat engagement.
This article breaks down Telegram adoption across key MENA markets, shows how the platform differs from mainstream channels, and explains the main Telegram marketing options available to businesses.
Telegram has become the third most popular messaging app globally. However, its value goes well beyond messaging. Channels function as content hubs, groups foster active communities, more than 10 million chatbots support automated journeys, and mini apps allow users to play games, manage finances, purchase products, and more, directly inside Telegram.
For brands assessing Telegram users in MENA, the regional opportunity is already substantial. The latest Telegram MENA statistics show large audiences across both high-population markets and wealthier Gulf economies, making the platform highly effective for customer acquisition, engagement, and market entry.
MENA Telegram users by country
Egypt leads with around 45.5 million active Telegram users by Q4 2025, up from roughly 39 to 41 million in Q1. That implies about 12% growth over the year and gives brands access to one of the largest Telegram audiences in the region.
Türkiye has approximately 23.7 million active Telegram users and is one of the region’s most active crypto markets. The country recorded nearly $200 billion in annual crypto transactions, almost four times the UAE’s $53 billion. For crypto and FinTech brands, that combination of a large Telegram audience and strong digital asset adoption creates a valuable environment for reaching engaged users, building trust through communities, and driving user acquisition.
Saudi Arabia reaches around 18 million active Telegram users. Combined with high purchasing power and strong adoption of digital services, that makes the Kingdom an important Telegram market for finance, real estate, e-commerce, education, and premium consumer products. Saudi Arabia also illustrates the broader rise of Telegram adoption in Middle Eastern markets, where the platform is increasingly used alongside established social and messaging channels.
Algeria has roughly 17 million active users, giving brands substantial reach in North Africa. For businesses expanding beyond the Gulf, Algeria provides access to a large mobile-first audience and strengthens Telegram's role as a regional rather than Gulf-only acquisition channel.
The UAE has a smaller absolute audience, yet usage intensity makes the market commercially valuable. Telegram ranks as the second most popular app after TikTok, and users spend around one hour per day on the platform. For brands competing in one of the region's most crowded advertising markets, Telegram provides an additional route to investors, founders, traders, consumers, and expatriate communities.
Israel has around 3.1 million active Telegram users. The audience stands out for how heavily the platform is used for information consumption. According to research by the Israel Democracy Institute, 52% of respondents rely on WhatsApp and Telegram as their main sources of news, while Telegram users follow an average of 10 groups. That behavior makes Telegram a strong fit for finance, investing, technology, Web3, and other categories where users actively seek specialist information and follow multiple communities.
Qatar counts around 787,000 active Telegram users. The audience is relatively small, but its concentration in a high-income market makes Telegram useful for premium finance, real estate, education, and high-value services where reach quality matters more than volume.
Oman is home to roughly 559,000 active Telegram users. For regional brands, the opportunity is less about scale and more about extending GCC coverage into a smaller market with less crowded media conditions.
Taken together, these figures show that Telegram market share in MENA is large enough to support serious regional acquisition strategies. For brands, Telegram offers the reach and targeting needed to connect with the right audiences across MENA and turn that attention into real business results.
Telegram stands out most when community context matters.
Meta and TikTok are built for broad algorithmic discovery. Google captures active search demand. WhatsApp is widely used for one-to-one communication and customer service across MENA. Telegram plays a different role: it brings niche communities, bots, mini apps, and native ads into one connected environment. That makes Telegram marketing in MENA a strong option for reaching people based on their interests, not just broad platform algorithms.
A Telegram video ad example
For companies evaluating Telegram for business in Middle Eastern and North African markets, one of the biggest advantages is what happens after the click. Brands can build an owned audience through channels, bots, and mini apps, creating more opportunities to educate, re-engage, and convert users without paying for every new interaction. For businesses with longer sales cycles or strong retention potential, that can improve the value of each acquired user over time.
The Telegram advertising benefits go well beyond reach. The platform can support several stages of the customer journey, from awareness and customer acquisition to conversion and long-term engagement.
To sum up, Telegram advertising can do more than generate the first click. It can support acquisition, conversion, and continued engagement within the same ecosystem, which gives brands more ways to turn paid traffic into lasting customer relationships.
Let’s take a closer look at the advertising options that can support your Telegram marketing strategy.
Telegram Ads is Telegram’s native advertising platform. Sponsored messages are primarily text-based, with support for emojis, images, and videos to make the ad creative more engaging.
Ads can appear in:
Depending on the Telegram Ads account type, you can direct users to channels, specific posts, bots, mini apps, business profiles, websites, or other destinations.
Advertisers can use either Fragment Accounts or more advanced Business Telegram Ads accounts. Standard Fragment Accounts offer basic targeting and are mainly suited to campaigns that keep users inside Telegram, such as growing a channel, bot, or mini app. Business Accounts are designed for brands that need greater control over performance and scale: they support euro billing, more granular geographic and audience targeting, audience exclusions, and external destinations such as websites, app stores, product pages, and lead forms.
Magnetto.com gives brands exclusive access to Telegram Business Ads accounts, with advanced targeting and the flexibility to run and scale campaigns more effectively across MENA.
Telegram mini app ads add another layer to Telegram advertising: they reach users while they are already interacting with games, tools, financial services, shopping experiences, or other products inside the platform. That gives advertisers access to audiences in a more active environment than a standard content feed.
Telegram mini app advertising formats
TMA advertising can take several forms, including static banners, GIFs, video ads, and task-based formats. Campaigns can run on a CPM basis when the goal is reach and brand awareness, or on a CPC basis when the priority is clicks and user actions. This gives businesses more flexibility to match the buying model to the objective, whether they are launching a new product, driving registrations, promoting an offer, or acquiring new users.
Telegram influencers build strong relationships with highly focused communities. Instead of introducing your brand cold, they present it through a voice their audience already knows and trusts. That credibility can have a direct impact on action: 69% of people are more likely to respond to recommendations from influencers, friends, or family than to brand messaging. On Telegram specifically, 73% of users say they trust particular public authors.
User trust in Telegram channels. Source: Telegram Marketing Statistics and Trends:
The 2025–2026 Report
For brands, Telegram influencer campaigns offer a way to enter relevant communities without having to build an audience from scratch. Sponsored posts can help generate awareness, drive targeted traffic, grow a channel or bot, and support registrations, leads, or sales. This is especially useful when entering a new market, as a trusted local channel can introduce your brand to an audience that may be unfamiliar with it.
A strong Telegram advertising strategy starts with audience mapping. Identify the channels, bots, and search themes your buyers already use. Separate broad category audiences from high-intent niches. A real estate advertiser, for example, may need separate clusters for investors, relocation, luxury property, and mortgages instead of one generic "property" audience.
Next, structure Telegram Ads MENA campaigns by market. English often plays a major role in the UAE, while Arabic messaging needs to reflect local language and buying behavior across Gulf and North African markets. Türkiye requires Turkish-language campaigns, and expatriate-heavy markets may justify separate multilingual ad groups.
The destination should match the campaign objective. Use a Telegram channel for ongoing content and community growth, a bot for onboarding or lead qualification, a mini app for richer product interaction, and an external landing page when your web funnel is already optimized for conversion.
Keep the campaign structure clean enough to see what is driving results. Avoid mixing unrelated audiences, countries, creatives, and destinations in one setup. Separate high-intent audiences from broader discovery segments, compare similar placements, and judge performance by qualified leads, registrations, deposits, purchases, or activated users rather than CTR alone.
Telegram is already part of how millions of people across MENA discover information, follow communities, and interact with digital products. For brands, the opportunity is to meet those users in an environment they already know, trust, and use regularly.
The best approach is to treat Telegram as a distinct acquisition channel with its own audience behavior, formats, and conversion paths. When those pieces are aligned, it can add meaningful reach and revenue potential to a regional growth strategy.
Sofia Mozolkova is the Head of Marketing at Magnetto.com. With over 7 years of experience in digital marketing, she shares her expertise to help brands effectively leverage advertising channels, build scalable growth strategies, and turn traffic into long-term customers.
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