Instagram auto-reply generator

The Folder Nobody Opens

Read the public comment reply this tool writes and you will find a sentence that looks like padding: check your message requests if you cannot see it. It is not padding, it is the most operationally useful line in the whole set. A message sent by an account somebody does not follow lands in a separate requests folder rather than in their inbox, and a large share of the people you helpfully slide into the DMs of will never see the message you sent. The Instagram auto-reply generator above is written around that problem rather than around it.

Which is why the comment reply says out loud where the message went. One sentence, and it recovers conversations that would otherwise have simply never happened.

What the Instagram Auto-Reply Generator Writes

Four messages at once, not one.

You pick your industry and a tone, type your business name and the keyword you want to use, and you get the DM greeting, the keyword reply, the public comment reply and the away message, with a button to copy all four together.

None of it is generated on the fly. The four are written in advance for eight trades and three tones, with your name, your keyword and your trade’s own noun dropped into them, which is why they appear complete before any script runs on the page.

Four Messages, Four Different Moments

The reason it gives you all four rather than one is that they are not variations. Each one fires at a different point and has a different job.

• The DM greeting is the first thing somebody sees when they message you at all.
• The keyword reply is what happens when they do the thing the greeting asked for.
• The public comment reply is what everybody else reads under your post.
• The away message is what arrives when nobody is there.

Most accounts set up one of these, usually the greeting, and then wonder why the automation does not lead anywhere. It does not lead anywhere because there is nothing after it.

The Industry Setting Changes One Word

The industry dropdown is not choosing between eight sets of messages. It is choosing the noun for the thing being booked, and then that noun runs through all four.

A salon and a clinic get an appointment. A studio or gym gets a class. A restaurant gets a table, a shop gets an order, an estate agent gets a viewing, a tutor gets a lesson and a trade gets a visit.

It is a small substitution and it is the difference between a message that sounds like yours and one that sounds like it came off a template, because nothing gives away a canned reply faster than the wrong word for the thing your customers are booking.

If none of the eight is exactly you, pick the one whose noun is right rather than the one whose label is closest.

The Greeting Ends by Naming the Keyword

Look at how the DM greeting is built. It thanks the person, says tell us what you are after and we will sort your booking, and then does the important bit: it names a specific word to reply with and says what that word gets them.

That last sentence is the whole mechanism. A greeting that ends by inviting somebody to say anything they like produces a message you have to read and answer by hand. A greeting that ends by offering the price list in exchange for one word produces a reply you can answer automatically.

It is also the honest kind of trade. They get something they wanted, immediately, and you get an intention you can act on.

The Keyword Reply Asks for a Day

The second message is where most automations stop and this one keeps going.

It acknowledges the keyword, then asks for the day that suits, and promises to come back with the price and confirm the booking. It ends with your business name.

That single question is doing the work. It replaces an open invitation with something a person can answer in one word while standing at a bus stop, and a day is the piece of information you actually need before anything else can happen.

Notice what it does not do: it does not send a price list into the chat. It promises the price alongside the confirmation, which keeps the conversation going instead of ending it with a number somebody can compare against a competitor.

The Comment Reply Is for the Audience

The public one is short, and it is the only one of the four that most of its readers are not the subject of.

It thanks the commenter, says a DM has been sent, and names the requests folder. Everyone else scrolling the post sees a business that answers comments and sends people the details, which is worth more than the individual reply it appears to be.

The professional version drops the folder sentence and simply says a direct message has been sent. If most of your commenters already follow you, that version reads more cleanly. If you are getting comments from people who found the post rather than the account, keep the folder line in.

The Away Message Is the Only One That Promises a Time

Three of the four commit you to nothing in particular. The away message commits you to a deadline, and it is worth reading before you use it.

The warm and playful versions say you will be back first thing. The professional version says within one working day. Both are reasonable and both are promises with your name under them, made automatically, at three in the morning, to somebody you have never met.

If first thing is not true of you on a Saturday, change it. A vaguer version costs you nothing: we pick messages up in the morning, or we answer Monday to Friday, are both honest and neither sets a clock running.

The clever part of the away message is the second half, which repeats the keyword. Somebody who arrives at midnight can still get the price list at midnight, which means the automation is useful in exactly the hours a person is not.

Choosing the Keyword

The panel opens on BOOK, which is a good default and not always the right one.

Four things make a keyword work.

• It is a word somebody would type. Short, obvious, spelled one way. PRICES and BOOK are better than the name of your offer.
• It does not appear in ordinary messages. This is the one people get wrong. A keyword like HELP or HI will fire on messages that were not trying to trigger anything, and the customer gets a canned reply to a real question.
• It is one word. Two words means two chances to get it wrong.
• It is written everywhere you use it. In the caption, in the greeting, in the away message, in the comment. A keyword nobody has been told about is not a keyword.

Whatever you pick, type it into the panel before you copy anything, because it appears in three of the four messages and swapping it later means redoing all of them.

Every Link Has to Name the Next One

This is the design underneath the four messages, and it is the reason they work as a set and fail individually.

The comment reply points at the DM. The DM greeting points at the keyword. The keyword reply asks for a day. The away message points back at the keyword. There is no point in the chain where somebody is left holding a friendly message with nothing to do next.

That is the test to apply if you rewrite any of them, which you should. Read your version and ask what the customer is supposed to do in the next ten seconds. If the answer is not obvious in the message itself, the chain is broken there and everything downstream of it stops.

What the Instagram Auto-Reply Generator Cannot Do

• It does not connect to Instagram. No account, no login, no permissions, no access to your messages.
• It does not set anything up. It writes four messages and copies them. Something else has to run them.
• It does not know your existing keywords. If you already use BOOK for something else, nothing here will tell you.
• It cannot test the chain. Send yourself the keyword from another account once it is live, because that is the only real test.
• Nothing is stored. Copy all four before you close the tab.
• Nothing is written by a model. A fixed set for eight trades and three tones.

Where the Four Messages Go

Copying them is the easy half. Something has to fire them at the right moment, and on the right channel, which is where most of these projects quietly stop.

With DMly all four run from one place, and not only on Instagram: the same greeting, keyword, comment reply and away message work across Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok, with a handover to a person at the point where the automation runs out of useful things to say.

Two things are worth having ready alongside them. The comment replies for everything the keyword does not cover, which the comment reply generator writes for all three platforms. And a link people can tap to open the DM in the first place, which the Instagram DM link generator builds for your bio, your ads and your website.

If most of your enquiries end up on WhatsApp rather than Instagram, the welcome message generator is the same job over there.