How To Automatically Reply to Instagram Story Replies

In this tutorial, I will explain how you can automatically reply to Instagram Story replies. Basically, we are going to create our own Instagram Story Bot.

I will show you how to:

• Connect your Instagram account to ManyChat (the chatbot builder we use)
• Automatically reply when somebody messages you after seeing your Instagram story
• Set up the reply for specific Instagram stories or for all stories

Let’s dive in!

 

Link your Instagram account to your Facebook account

Before we can set up the automatic reply for Instagram Stories, we first need to link our Instagram account to our Facebook account.

By the way, also make sure that your Instagram account is a Business account (and not a personal account)!

Now, go to one of your pages on Facebook and click on Settings –> Instagram.

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

 

Connect Instagram account to ManyChat

The next step we need to do is connect our Instagram account to ManyChat.

ManyChat is the chatbot builder I am going to use for this tutorial and is one of the best chatbot builders out there.

If you don’t have a ManyChat account yet, click on the button below and create it:

Create ManyChat Account

NOTE: If you use the promo code “3DINSTAGROW”, you can upgrade to a Pro account for free for 60 days! 

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

Now, 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 that’s it! We’ve successfully connected your Instagram account to ManyChat.

 

Set up Instagram Stories Trigger in ManyChat

Now that we’ve successfully connected our Instagram account to ManyChat, we can start by creating our auto reply to Instagram stories.

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

Then, select Start from scratch at the right bottom:

And here we can type in the name of the flow, we will call it “Instagram Stories Reply”:

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

First, we will change the starting step. The starting step is a trigger that starts the flow in ManyChat. And in this case, this will be when someone replies to your Instagram story.

So, just click on Add Trigger under the Starting Step:

And then you can select “Instagram” and choose the Instagram Story Reply:

This will automatically open up the trigger where you can determine the settings of the Instagram Story Reply.

If you want to only reply to specific stories, you need to set it to Specific Story and then click on Select Story:

This will open up a pop-up where you can select the stories that are currently running on your Instagram account:

However, for this tutorial, I am going to set it to All Stories.

Next, we need to determine to what words we want to reply. For example, users can get a free ebook when they message “ebook1”, we can set message is ebook1 and click on Save:

And that’s it! Now you automatically reply when somebody messages you “ebook1” after seeing your Instagram Story.

 

Send automatic message after Instagram Story Reply

Next, we need to determine the message we want to send to the user.

To do that, you can just click on the first message in the ManyChat flow, which opens a screen on the left:

Then, we can type in the message we want to send. And this message can consist of text and quick replies (buttons in ManyChat).

Let’s say we want to give away a free ebook to the people that messaged us, then we can type “Thank you for requesting the ebook! Click the button below to get it”:

Also, we need to add a quick reply. Because before we give away the free checklist, we want to get the email of the user.

So just click on Add Quick Reply, type in “Get the ebook”, setting the “When This Button is Pressed” to Instagram and click on Done:

Now when somebody clicks on the quick reply, another message will be sent to the user.

And in this message, we will ask for the email of the user. So click on the Message, delete the default text and select the User Input element:

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

Because we set the Reply Type to Email, ManyChat automatically checks if the user filled in a valid email.

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

This will make sure users cannot skip the 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:

And thank them for requesting the ebook + provide a button that will go to the checklist once they click on it:

And that’s it, now you should have a flow that looks like this:

The last step. is to click on Publish in the top-right corner and you’re all set!

NOTE: After clicking on Publish, don’t forget to Activate your Instagram Comments trigger at the beginning of the flow:

 

 

What if it’s not working?

Although you set up everything correctly, sometimes the automatic reply for Instagram Stories is not sending anything.

And if that’s happening to you, just go to Settings in ManyChat, select Instagram and click on Refresh permissions:

This will solve your problem almost anytime.

 

Now It’s Your Turn

And that’s how you automatically reply to Instagram Stories.

Now I would like to ask you a question:

How much time are you currently spending on replying to Instagram Stories?

Let me know by leaving a comment below.