How To Automatically Reply to Instagram Comments (+ Video)

In this tutorial, I will explain how to automatically reply to Instagram Comments. Basically, we are going to create our own Instagram Comment Bot.

I will show you how to:

Connect your Instagram account to ManyChat (chatbot builder we use)
Use the Instagram features if you don’t have enough followers (Instagram test account)
Automatically reply to Instagram Comments

Let’s dive in!

Table of Contents

Connect your Instagram account to Facebook

Before we can automatically reply to comments on Instagram, we first need to connect our Instagram account to our Facebook account.

Also, you need to make sure that your Instagram account is a Business account, otherwise you cannot automatically reply to comments.

Once you’re sure you have a Business account, just go to your Facebook Page and click on Settings –> Instagram.

Here, you can click on Connect account under “Connect to Instagram” and connect the two accounts to each other:

Connect ManyChat to Instagram

Once you have an Instagram test account or an account with at least 10,000 followers, we can start with creating our Instagram chatbot.

To create our Instagram chatbot, we are going to use ManyChat, which is one of the best chatbot builders for Instagram. If you don’t have an account yet, click on the button below and create your ManyChat account.

Create ManyChat Account

When you’ve created your ManyChat account, go to Settings –> Instagram, and click on Connect:

Next, you can select one of your Facebook Pages that is connected with your Instagram account. In my case, it is ‘Chatimize Test’, so I will click on that one:

And now we’ve successfully connected ManyChat to Instagram.

Set up Instagram Comments Trigger in ManyChat

Now that we’ve successfully connected ManyChat to Instagram, we can start creating our chatbot flows.

In ManyChat, go to Automation and click on New flow:

Then, you need to select Empty flow:

And we can just type in the name of the flow, such as “Comment flow”:

Now, ManyChat automatically creates a flow for us that consists of a starting step and an Instagram message.

So, first we will change the starting step. The starting step is a trigger that starts the chatbot flow. And in our case, this will be when someone comments on an Instagram post.

So, you can just click on Add trigger under the Starting Step:

And then you can search for “Instagram comment” and select the Instagram Comments trigger:

On the left, the Instagram Comments Growth Tool automatically opens up and we can set up how it works:

With ManyChat, you can automatically reply to:

All Instagram Posts
Specific Instagram Posts

For this tutorial, I will go with a specific Instagram post.

By the way, if you want to automatically reply to all Instagram Posts, you need to have the ManyChat Pro plan.

So, you can just click on Select a post and choose one of your Instagram posts:

Once you have selected a post, you can also exclude or include certain comments.

If you want to exclude comments with specific keywords (for example, “no”, you can just type in “no” under “Exclude comments with these keywords”

Also, if you only want to respond to comments with specific keywords (for example, “yes”), then you can just type in “yes” under “Only trigger for comments with these keywords”.

Because I only want to reply to comments with the word “checklist” in them, I type in checklist:

And that’s it! Now, you can just hit Save!

Send automatic message after Instagram Comment

The next step is to automatically send a message in Instagram DM to the user that commented on your Instagram post.

To do that, you can just click on the first message in the chatbot flow, which will open up a screen on the left:

Then, the first thing we need to do is set the right Content Type. This is extremely important, if you don’t set this up right, the complete flow will not work.

Just click on the dropdown under Content Type and select the Comment Reply under “Instagram Post Comments”:

Then, we can just type in a message. And this message can consist of text + quick replies.

Let’s say we are a Fitness company and we want to give a free Fitness checklist to the people that replied to our Instagram post.

Then, we can just type in something in the message block, such as “Thank you for requesting the checklist! Click the button below to get it”:

Also, we need to add a quick reply. Because before we are giving the free checklist, we will ask for their email.

So you can just add a quick reply by clicking on Add Quick Reply, typing in the content of the button, setting the “When This Button is Pressed”
to Send Message and click on Done:

Now, if someone clicks on the quick reply, another message will be sent to the user.

In this message, we will ask for the email of the user. And because we are asking for information of the user, we need to use the User Input element.

So, you need to delete the first message in this block, and click on User Input:

Then, you can just type in “Allright, to what email can I send the checklist?” and set the Reply Type to Email:

By setting the reply type to email, ManyChat will check if the input typed in by the user is indeed an email address, really useful feature!

Also, you need to scroll down and remove the text under “Skip button text”:

This will make sure that users cannot skip this question 🙂

The last step we need to do is give the ebook to the user. So we can just drag an arrow from Next step, letting it go and click on Instagram Message: