Overview of Inbox for Instagram

Engage with your audience through direct messages

Kate avatar
Written by Kate
Updated over a week ago

Instagram is not only a social hub – it’s a place where people discover and connect with brands. Customers increase spending on brands they follow on social media if they receive personalized and timely social responses.

To help our clients provide an outstanding user experience, we have integrated Instagram direct messages (DMs) and comments into our Inbox in PromoRepublic. With this integration, you’ll never miss an opportunity to engage with your audience, get a holistic view of all your incoming messages and create a stronger 1-1 connection.

PromoRepublic's Inbox feature is available for Instagram business pages. It covers:

  • Direct messages

  • Comments

You may want to sort the comments on the posts by:

  • Default

  • Reviewed first

  • Unreviewed first

Default means a chronological order.

Reviewed first means that the chosen type of conversation will appear in chronological order, though the dialogues that were answered or marked manually as reviewed will appear first. When you answer a comment in the PromoRepublic interface, it will be marked with a green checkmark (marked as reviewed) automatically.

If it were answered on the Instagram page natively, the comment wouldn't be marked with a green checkmark.

Unreviewed first means that the dialogues that were not answered or marked manually as unreviewed will appear first in chronological order. And reviewed conversations will appear afterwards.

A blue dot signifies that the communication wasn't open in the PromoRepublic interface even if it was natively seen and processed in Instagram.

To mark the comment or a message as processed, tap on the tick sign on the right, and it'll become green.

Direct Messages

To receive DMs in the Inbox, you need to allow access to the Messages option in the Instagram mobile app. For that, open your Instagram app and:

  1. Select the necessary Instagram Business profile;

  2. Tap Settings (3 lines in the top right corner) > tap Privacy > tap Messages;

  3. Toggle on “Allow access to Messages”.

Also, grant permission to pull the Direct messages to the platform when connecting this page to PromoRepublic.

Once done, the system will probably ask you to re-authorize each Instagram Business Profile you want messages to appear for in the Inbox.

How to reply to an Instagram DM?

Once Instagram Business Profile is connected and all permissions are given, you can interact with direct messages and story mentions. To reply to an Instagram DM:

  1. Navigate to the Inbox Section.

  2. Select Instagram Business Profile.

  3. Select the DM you want to respond to.

  4. Enter your response to the DM.

  5. Click Reply.

When you want to reply to a message in the Inbox interface, you can use text and images (supported formats are jpg, png. It should be less than 15 MB).

Note:

  • You can’t separate DMs and Story Mentions from one another.

  • You’ll see just the new messages received after Instagram Business was reconnected.

  • We'll start with covering the Instagram response time policy as it is the most straightforward. Any time a message is received, the response window is set to 7 days.

  • Messages replied via PromoRepublic will still be shown as unread in the native Instagram app. This is because third-party integrations, like PromoRepublic, can’t sync read status with the native Instagram app.

  • Group threads (conversations with more than 2 participants) are not supported.

  • At the moment, it is not possible to​​ respond to public comments with private messages.

  • Also, it is not possible to like the messages.

  • Recommended DM reply size is less than 1,000 characters.

Comments

In the conversation list on the left, you can see first-level and second-level comments as separate entities. Upon clicking on a comment in the left side list, you'll see the thread on the right.

The comments' functionality works so that each new comment will automatically create a new conversation in a conversation list on the left regardless of the level. The purpose is to ensure that any incoming conversions are not left unnoticed.

In other words, comments on the same post are shown separately. On the right, you won't see the other comment.

Second-level comments (replies) are indicated in a thread by a vertical line from the first-level comment. The dialogue screen allows you to navigate through the entire conversation thread and reply on any level.

At any time, you can jump to the Instagram interface directly to answer and view the conversation.

We hope you'll enjoy the Inbox service and you'll benefit from it.

If you have any further questions, please get in touch with us at [email protected].

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