Lately on Instagram, many brands and business owners have been asking their community to leave comments with a specific word so that they’ll receive a DM with more information. If you’ve seen this trend and wondered how it worked, then today’s video is for you! Manychat is an amazing tool for brands growing on Instagram and has helped us personally grow our Stephanie Kase Education email list. Manychat is an automation tool that’s been approved by Instagram and today, I’m going to show you how to set it all up!

Using Manychat

Create a free account to get started on Manychat. Once you’ve done that and you’re logged in, you’re ready to begin preparing these automations! For today’s tutorial, I want to walk through how to create an automation that will send someone a DM if they comment on a Reel or photo post with a specific word. 

On the left hand side, select “automation” – which is the third icon down. Then go to the top of the screen in the upper right hand side to select “new flow”. Manychat has some great templates ready to go, and I encourage you to explore them all. But, for today, choose the template that says “message people who leave a comment”. One of the things I love about Manychat is that they show you exactly what’s going on with the template and each step. Manychat explains what’s happening in each step as well as providing tips to make the most of your automation. All you really need to worry about are the two green boxes! 

Setting Up Your Automation

Select the first box so that you can select the trigger for your Manychat automation. On the free version, you can select a specific post or Reel to connect to this automation – so once you post it, come into Manychat and select the post you’re looking for. If you pay for the pro version, you can have it do all posts or your next one. We do use the pro because it helps us connect with more people and we don’t have to select posts every time. 

Below that, you can exclude comments or trigger the automation for specific keywords. After you’ve added your keyword, hit “auto-response” so you can have Manychat provide a response to those comments. We usually do something like “Yay! Just sent you a DM with the link!”. After you’ve got your starting step setup, choose the other green box so you can set up what they’ll receive in the DM! You can also have this step automatically reply to comments, too, so just make sure you do this OR the auto-response in step 1 (not both!). 

Craft your response to someone (something like – I saw you wanted a link) and provide the link. There’s a lot of options you can add for this response but we keep it pretty simple! 

There you go! Now you know how to setup a Manychat automation to send people links, freebies, or whatever direct links you want to send to your audience. Watch the video for a behind-the-scenes walk through if you have any questions about how to set all of this up! 

Other Instagram Resources 

Are you struggling to keep up on Instagram? Are you seeing low engagement, not posting consistently, and not attracting the right followers? I want to help!! Join my free Instagram class: What to Post on Instagram for the Next 30 Days: How to Post Consistently, Grow Your Reach, & Gain Highly Engaged Followers. We’re going to chat about what you should post, how often to post, and how to make Instagram fun! Head to http://stephaniekase.com/instagramclass to watch now.

I also offer a free one-hour Instagram Reels class if you want more help with how to grow your reach, followers, and customers with Reels in 2 hours a month! You can sign up for that HERE. And, if you have questions or want some extra support, I’ve got a FREE Reels Growth Facebook Community that you can join. I absolutely love getting to chat with everyone and help them work through their questions about Reels!

Wondering what to make for your next Reel? Free quiz to find out what type of reel idea you should make next! 

Discover what your next step should be to gain your next 1,000 followers!

Need ideas for Instagram? Grab our free sample Instagram posting schedule here!

If you’re listening and you have ideas about what to talk about next, please send in your requests! I really do want to know what you want to hear about in future episodes. Email me at [email protected] with your questions!! I can’t wait to hear from you! Don’t forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, too. We appreciate all of the support and love!