The moment you have more than one collected list, they start overlapping. A person can belong to three chats in your field and appear in the database three times — then receive the same message three times, which is the worst possible outcome.
The order matters
1. Duplicates first
Match on the account identifier, not the display name: people change names, identifiers do not. Identical names with different identifiers are different people and must not be merged.
2. Then remove the unusable
- entries with no username — you cannot message those: users without a username;
- bots, which are flagged as such;
- deleted accounts;
- your own accounts, if they sit in the same chats.
3. Only then segment
Splitting an uncleaned list produces segments of uneven quality, which makes every later comparison meaningless.
Admins and moderators
A special case. Formally participants, practically the people for whom an unsolicited direct message is grounds to ban you from the chat. Keep them in a separate list and out of any outreach — while remaining exactly the people to talk to about placements.
Channel lists age faster than people lists
A person does not shut down; a channel does. Channels stop publishing, close comments, get deleted, so a collected channel list decays within months while a list of people mostly does not. Check channels regularly and people before each campaign, rather than on a fixed calendar.
What cleaning cannot fix
A list collected from the wrong places. No amount of deduplication makes an irrelevant audience relevant — that is decided earlier, at keyword research. And some entries are unreachable regardless of hygiene: what parsing can and cannot do.
How Neurogram does this
Everything above is manual work that runs into the number of hours in a day. Neurogram does it on your own accounts and without you: it collects channels and audiences, writes comments and replies with a language model, and keeps limits and quiet hours so the accounts survive. See pricing or look at your case.