With Instagram becoming one of the most popular mainstream social media platforms, businesses that use Instagram for marketing may find it difficult and time-consuming to tend to all their customer comments and messages. Instagram users send more than 400 million messages daily. This includes Story replies, product inquiries, requests for partnerships, and other messages. While businesses receive these messages 24/7, usually they only respond to DMs for a few minutes each day. Automated messaging on Instagram can help.
Filtering various messages is a challenge, especially for large businesses with many inquiries. This means many businesses can easily miss important messages, such as product inquiries, story tags, or mentions. Fortunately, this issue can be solved by automating your Instagram messages, either by using Instagram or an automation system like EarthWeb.
Instagram is primarily a watching, discovering, and buyers’ platform, with 81% of Instagram users searching for products and services. Due to various algorithms, it is only a matter of minutes before your potential customer finds similar products and services from competitor pages on the platform. If they DM the competitor and get an instant response, they are more likely to purchase from your competitor. Response time can greatly influence a potential sale.
However, with automated messaging, you are able to respond to customer or prospect inquiries immediately. Automating messaging enables businesses to generate leads and revenues in ways that were impossible before. For startup businesses that aren’t getting as many organic messages, you can use automation to trigger responses.
Before warming up to Instagram’s automated messaging, begin by ensuring that your business can access the feature. Instagram messaging automation is slowly being rolled out to business accounts. Even if your business can’t access it right now, it is worth including it in your marketing strategy plan. The best way to confirm this is by signing up for one of these automation tools, such as Ingramer, Dmpro, or Insazood.
After accessing the automation tool, you should manage your settings to ensure you have the tool running correctly. For starters, you can run an Instagram story to test a keyword for direct sales or lead generation. Stories are the best for testing as 50% of Instagram messages originate from stories.
If the responses from the test appear to be reliable, you can proceed with your automated messages. You can use automated messages for lead generation, to provide customer support, or for marketing and sales.
As mentioned, automated messaging on Instagram is best if you want to improve your DM efficiency. It also improves communication with your followers and frees up more of your time. Below are four ways you can use this automation feature;
Automated messaging might be a lifesaver if your customers frequently ask questions. This includes products available, queries about whether you ship to their locations, prices, and more. If your support team types the same responses repeatedly, automated messaging may be the right solution for you. Simply create a pre-written list of replies with answers to common questions and set a relevant keyword to trigger the response.
You should expect tons of messages when running a giveaway. Fortunately, you can save time responding to inquisitive followers by crafting a simple response to all inquiries. The response might be an outline of the details and rules for the giveaway.
Instagram is not only great for lead generation and driving sales but also for customer support. You can use automated messages to respond to common customer inquiries.
Responding to your follower's DMs is not about being polite. It is about helping grow your business and building your brand. While this may seem like something small, it means a lot to your followers. There is no better way of engaging and connecting with your followers than responding to their messages. Fortunately, you can automate replies for common DMs. Thereby freeing up time to personally respond to other messages.
Automated messaging can help your business save time when interacting with customers. However, while they are efficient, remember that they should only be used for common comments or questions. You should still customize responses for other questions, lest your business appears insincere or cold.
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With 800 million monthly active users, Instagram is definitely worth a look from entrepreneurs and business marketers as a way to connect with your audiences. Many businesses don't give Instagram the attention it deserves simply because it's a mobile-based platform social media platform. It does have business tools and profiles but typically must be managed from a smartphone. You can upload photos only from a tablet or smartphone, but not laptops or desktops. You can save drafts, but not schedule them for future posting.
It's not a problem if you're a casual user. After all, being able to upload photos straight from your mobile device and see them on your Instagram feed right away is the height of convenience. But if you want to build a business brand, this poses some limitations. You're most likely editing photos and have a planned content calendar for your business marketing. As such, you most likely would want to schedule posts beforehand using a computer where your brand assets are stored. And before, this could not be done on Instagram but now....
You can schedule for Instagram on your desktop with Grum! As an Instagram auto-scheduler, Grum helps users plan and organize their Instagram feeds beforehand so that they don’t need to post only in real time. You can create and line up entries in the user-friendly dashboard, and schedule them to post with Grum.
Your Instagram feed will be updated in a timely manner even if you're too busy with other stuff.
A helpful application like Grum is unsurprisingly not free, but it is easy on the pocket.
Currently, they offer three packages: Start, Grow, and Agency. Ideal for small businesses, Start costs $9.95 a month for one to two accounts. A good option for medium-sized businesses, Grow costs $3.95 a month per account for three to five accounts. Designed for big businesses, Agency costs $2.95 a month per account for more than five accounts. All packages come with a free three-day trial and allow unlimited editors.
Whatever package you choose, there’s no denying that Grum is quite affordable and very useful for businesses that market on Instagram.
You can now go "Live" on a friend's profile. Here's how ... Go to their page and click to write on their timeline, then select "go live". From there you can invite others to join in and watch you.
Not sure what Facebook has planned for the future of this feature. It’s a great tool to wish someone a birthday! I wanted to keep you all informed of the update.
Great for coaches to leave an encouraging message for their clients. Not sure there will too many businesses uses as you’re posting from a personal profile to personal profile at this point.
To compete with SnapChat Facebook has rolled out Messenger Day. This Snapchat clone has over 5,000 effects, filters and more that you can add to photos and videos within your Messenger App. And just like Snapchat, Messenger Day items last only for 24 hours. It’s available in the Messenger app.
Businesses can use Messenger Day exactly like they use Snapchat. Whether it’s adopted and begins to compete with SnapChat is yet to be seen. It’s a move by Facebook to offer a comparable tool, which they also offer in a somewhat similar fashion in Instagram Stories.
Now businesses that use Instagram and Facebook only have 1 place to go to get Messenger messages, Facebook posts, and Instagram comments. Now you don’t have to sign into multiple accounts to keep abreast of what is going on.
You’ll save time and effort with this new inbox. And saving time is always a good thing.
These are not new, but totally worth a mention. Check out Instagram’s tools, Layout, Boomerang, and Hyperlapse. These are unique apps and features within the Instagram App itself.
Create one of a kind photos from your phone by combining, flipping and mirroring multiple photos into a single image.
Create mini-videos that do just that...boomerang! They go out and come back. It’s a catchy way to share content.
This app fixes shaky footage for you to create smooth timelapse videos.
These in phone apps make it easy for small businesses to create a polished presentation. The more polished your presentation the more professional your business looks to potential clients.
Show your production process using Hyperlapse to get your customers familiar with your product and quality.
These ads are run through Facebook’s Power Editor and Ads Manager. These are cost per impression ads and support website clicks, website conversions and mobile app installs. The impression is measured as soon as the ads appear, which is different from Facebook video ads that must run for 3 seconds before the impression is counted. The viewer will know the video is an ad because of the small sponsored tag at the bottom center of the screen. The ads are skippable.
It will depend on your audience if these ads will be successful for your business. If your audience is on Instagram and views Instagram Stories, these ads are a good gamble.
In an effort to keep influencers from breaking FCC regulations Instagram has rolled out Partner Tags. These tags allow brands to their promotional partners. This is still in the Beta stage, so don’t expect to see it on your page.
This will hopefully keep brands honest and make it easier for them to comply to FCC regulations.
This is the awesome new visual search tool for Pinterest. Point Lens at the item you want to search for and tap to find the item and related searches. Lens is still in Beta and it’s still learning what’s what.
This has great potential to help people find products, how to use the products, additional items needed or that coordinate with the product. This could turn into a sales tool that automatically upsells to the next level when the AI is trained and works as planned.
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