Instagram Auto Reply tools: an easy introduction

Instagram auto reply tools empower more functionalities than Quick Replies, the native application of Instagram. Therefore, they can be a great help for marketers, social media managers, and anybody who needs to use Instagram for daily business purposes.

How can a good Instagram auto reply tool beat Quick Replies? It is not only a matter of offering more functionalities. Artificial intelligence and deep learning have the power to turn your tool into something like a real chatbot, with all the advantages of the application of conversational AI to your business.

What is an Instagram auto reply tool?

Those who have never utilized Quick Reply would ask themselves what an Instagram auto reply tool is.

Well, the name speaks for itself: it is an application that automatizes the trying and boring job to answer to the comments and reactions of the followers, visitors, and admirers of an Instagram page, photo, or content.

Quick Replies itself is an example of a very basic Instagram auto reply tool. It consists of a set of draft messages (that it is up to the user to create) to quickly answer common questions. When the user taps on the proper icon, the pre-written message appears. In this way, the user does not need to write it.

The advantage of this tool is to speed up answering, which can be crucial for a social media manager that could have a rifle of messages to answer a day. Yet, Quick Replies does not totally solve the problem, as it requires human action to send the reply.

On the contrary, a good Instagram auto reply tool automatizes almost the whole process: There is a bot working behind that reads users’ messages and decides how to reply to each individual message in the most opportune way.

How to use an Instagram auto reply tool?

Being pretty visual, Instagram is intrinsically simpler than Facebook. Liking, commenting, saving, and sharing videos and photos exhaust 99% of its usage. A new promising feature of Instagram is Instagram Stories. Nike uses this specific feature to make some great storytelling about athletes’ pains and victories, and they show around their brand that way.

According to Hootsuite statistics, the Instagram audience is quite young – from 18 to 35 – and on the increase. The average user spends 30 minutes a day on the platform. Videos – not pics - are the most demanded content on Instagram.

Coming to marketing data, it is interesting to know that 58% of users are interested in knowing more about the brand after watching a video. It is not the case that Instagram Stories generate a quarter of the platform ads revenue.

To summarize, the typical usage of an Instagram auto reply tool comprehends all the following tasks:

• to automatically reply to users ‘comments, likes, and dislikes.
• to detect potential customers (for example, tracking someone that has enthusiastically commented a story).
• to track and retarget potential leads and send them personalized content or promotions/ads.
• to automatically ask questions and requests for information on the product/brand.
• to give basic customer assistance.
• to create engagement on the product using appropriate comments.
• to advertise discounts or other kinds of promotions.
• to better the engagement of your Instagram community through appropriate comments or messaging

In other words, an Instagram auto reply tool works in a similar way to a Facebook Auto Comment tool. Ideta has in store for you also this kind of product, in case of your interest. Read our introduction and tutorial.

Another possible use of an Instagram auto reply tool is data mining, which enables a more powerful way of detecting potential leads and optimizing marketing strategies.

In fact, artificial intelligence merged with deep learning can be a decisive weapon to discover your users’ habits and preferences, as these two technologies have been proved to be able to collect important marketing data through the tracking of users and the analysis of how they interact with your content.

The more common functionalities

What can users expect to find when they download an Instagram auto reply tool? Here comes the list of the most common functionalities of this kind of application.

• Setting an auto welcome message for first-time users.
• Adding auto comments in reply to your users’ comments that embody a link to a specific website, landing page, or other relevant resources (this function is basilar for any marketer, as it can be used to funnel the traffic to a digital selling point).
• Instant reply to any comment to your brand or Instagram story. For example, when a user mentions the name of your product, the bot shows to this user a thank you message with an invitation to know more and the link to a landing page.
• Fast and quick automated replies to the most commonly asked questions about your brands/products. There is also a native Instagram tool that does that.
• Sending direct messages to potential customers through their Instagram pages (this is called drip campaigning).
• Functions to personalize your automated messages according to a set of parameters.

The list of the functionalities that an Instagram auto reply tool can offer to marketers could go ahead, but I think that this is enough to give the reader an idea of what it is possible to do with this kind of tool.

Conclusions

A good Instagram auto reply tool can be a valuable asset for any social marketer, as it merges the advantage of automation (24/7 availability, cost-saving) with the advantage of social marketing (fast and easy accessibility to leads and customers).

The tasks that can be automatized are mostly the ones that involve routines, like sending welcome or thank you messages, answering FAQs, monitoring readers and producing accurate analytics, sending links or messages that drive traffic to landing pages or other selling points.

This is possible through the application of technologies like AI, chatbots, and deep learning, which make the magic with Instagram auto reply tools.