Don’t get us wrong, we don’t mean the automatic bots that follow other accounts, like posts, and leave comments on targeted lists. We mean Instagram Chatbot: A software program that enables you to create an automatic conversation with your followers using artificial intelligence. Having a chatbot will help you improve customer experience by providing instant support and solving their issues right away.
Why should you use an Instagram chatbot?
Instagram has over one billion active users and it’s ranked as one of the most used social media platforms of this year. This platform launched ten years ago as a photo-posting platform but it has evolved into a more complete one. Now you can share videos, sell products, send messages, and much more.
Nowadays, 200 million users visit at least one business profile daily. . Because of this, Instagram is not just a social media app, but a huge market place and a great marketing tool. But with such a huge audience, it’s difficult to take care of all the engagement. And hence companies have started to include chatbots to manage requests, improve customer experience and generate engagement.
What are the 4 reasons to use an Instagram chatbot?
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Yes, links. Look, we're all for keeping the single link in bio because it forces brands to be creative and avoid simply link dropping in every post. It’s why the link traffic from Instagram is of such high quality. But bots are going to open up the floodgates for link sharing, while still keeping the quality of traffic relatively high.
With bot, you’ll be able to have your audience type in a keyword in a message, triggering the bot. Depending on how you build the flow, you could immediately send them the link or request their email (which you can collect through integrations) before providing the link or ask a question to confirm this is the link they want, or whatever really.
Just think about it! Now, when you say “read the blog post” or “watch the video” or “find out more” or whatever, instead of following it up with “click the link in our bio,” your bot could send them the specific link to the blog post, or your blog page, or whatever you have set up. Or if you don’t have swipe up links in Stories, just include a CTA that says to DM you a certain word (which is as simple as replying to the Story post) and the same thing happens, sending them that link.
But you also need to be prepared to build and manage the chatbot flows. If you want to send a different link in every post, you’re going to need unique keywords to trigger each response and keep those updated and maintained in your chatbot management tool. So, yes, this is super cool and functional, but it’s also going to require you to do some work on the backend to keep it effective.
Want people to sign up for your newsletter, campaign, webinar, or event? You can send them directly to the registration page OR you can even build the registration steps right into the bot and have those exported (with more integration tools) to your CRM or event platform. Or get people a free PDF guide or tutorial after they give you their email address. Or get people a free PDF guide or tutorial after they give you their email address. You can also extract text from scanned PDF, if you have any important piece of content set aside.
One of the other super handy things is that you can set up a bot to launch anytime someone @ mentions you in a Story. Talk about not missing an opportunity! Since Stories are only available for those 24 hours, the bot can ensure that your team is responsive to those mentions. You could program the bot to respond with a thank you message or you could throw in a discount code as a thank you. Or if you were running a giveaway where you were encouraging Story posts as a condition of entry, the bot could be the automatic acknowledgement of submission which could provide them with a reminder of the giveaway terms and when the winner will be announced.
You can use the bot to manage your campaign tracking for performance. You could track the number of giveaway entries, the number of coupon code requests (versus sales conversions on the code), and email registrations or event sign ups. The bot will allow you to manage and track all those conversations so you can better determine which campaigns are most fruitful for your brand.
Yes, chatbots can integrate with your ads as well. The ad CTA could be to launch the chat and open up that automated dialog. Similar to all the organic content mentioned above, you could run ads for any of these same ideas, but have the action be the DM trigger with the bot which completes the automation and still allows you to collect an email address, get some information, provide them the item they requested, and more.
What can you do with your Instagram chatbot?
This one was pretty obvious, but it’s super important. Your don’t want your Instagram followers to feel like your brand is unreachable. You’ve got to make sure that you’re answering your follower’s questions as soon as they ask them.
Your Insta bot can deal with around 80% of the queries that you get, especially the repetitive ones, so that your team can focus its energy on the things that make your customers follow you and do business with you.
What’s more? Your Insta chatbot doesn’t just handle customer queries in English alone, it does that in 50+ languages.
As we mentioned, your Insta bot takes care of 80% of your customers’ queries, but what about the remaining 20%, those complicated ones that need personal attention?
That’s where live chat comes in. Your bot automatically routes the conversation to the agent best equipped to deal with that type of query. Your agents even get a OneView inbox so that they get context from past interactions your customers across other channels.
But wait, it gets better. The bot even lets you go multilingual without needing to hire agents that speak your customers’ language. With two-way auto-translations, live chat gets truly localized.
Got customers replying to stories with questions about your products? Your bot can pull context about the product in the story and answer your customers’ questions in a jiffy.
But that’s not where we stop when we’re talking about Insta stories. Your bot even helps you earn your customers loyalty. Let’s say a customer tries your product and shows your brand some love by posting a story and tagging you. That’s really good for you, but they’re going to get mighty frustrated if you don’t acknowledge and reply to their story.
Your Insta bot takes care of that too, allowing you to automatically reply to every story you’re tagged in.
They say ‘engagement’ is King on the ‘Gram, but it only works if there’s one word in front of it - ‘quick’.
If you don’t reply to comments and post mentions quickly, you’re leaving your customers annoyed. Thankfully, you don’t have to deal with these replies manually. Your Insta bot can find out whenever you get mentioned in comments or posts and answer those questions on it’s own, at lightning speed.
Instagram is one of the best places to market your product. You can engage with a wide audience by creating relatable content and use it to run ads also for a targeted customer base. Instagram ads work very well, as they are specifically targeted and sit well with the customer. The customer will find your ad interesting, have some questions regarding the product, and reach out to you on instagram. You reply to them, and it leads to a conversion. Hurray! But, what if multiple customers reach out to you, and customers are impatient, they don’t wait. How do you handle multiple leads?
A chatbot can come to your rescue here!
With Engati’s chatbot, you can take care of all such leads at any given point of time. The chatbot can answer almost all of the customer queries, and also gives you an option to integrate a live chat option, which you can use incase of any complex queries which need human intervention
The chatbot will also help in capturing leads, and storing customer data which you can use for further engagements and interactions with your customers.
With Engati’s chatbot you can directly link your shopify store to your Shopify store/or your website. But you necessarily need not take your customers to your website. Some people don’t like switching between apps, they’ll just think of checking out your website later and move on and forget and just like that you lose a sale. But with Engati’s instagram chatbot, you can directly sell your products and collect payments on instagram itself. Talk about smooth customer experience and increased sales?
Engati’s chatbot is capable of understanding and interacting with your customers just like a normal human. It can understand your customer's requirements very well and send product recommendations based on the users’ preferences. When the user sees something similar to what they already have in mind, they are more likely to buy it!
Customer feedback is very important, it makes your customer feel that you actually care about them and the experience they are having with the product. It also gives them a platform to raise a grievance incase of a bad experience. It can be really difficult to collect feedback individually from all your customers. An instagram chatbot can automatically collect feedback by sending out forms to your customers. It’ll also store this data properly allowing you to work on your drawbacks.
Best practices to ensure while creating/using an Instagram Chatbot:-
1. Have a plan
Instagram is the one of the best ways for your customers to reach you and for you to reach your customers. Apart from answering queries, you can also use Instagram to send out promotional messages for your brand. Have a plan on how you want to target, who you want to target and Do not spam your audience.
2. Monitor your bot
Yes, the bot saves you a lot of time, you don’t have to reply to the same repetitive questions. But these are also direct interactions with your customers, which is basically a treasure chest of insights for you. Don’t miss out on it! You’ll be able to mine out a lot of information about your customers and work on your product and marketing strategy accordingly.
3. Live Agent
No matter how efficient a chatbot is, there are going to be some customers who’ll need help from a real person. You need to keep the option open for live agents to take over a complex situation. Engati's Instagram chatbot allows you to easily integrate a live agent feature, so incase of any such query, an agent can take over seamlessly.
How do you make a chatbot on Instagram?
Chatbots aren’t going away. In fact, they’re growing by leaps and bounds and your business will be left behind if you don’t take steps to embrace this technology along with the omni-channel approach of built-in email and SMS features.
We have seen the same thing with businesses who ignored Facebook advertising until they realized they needed it while being eclipsed by their competition who figured it out earlier. The barrier to entry for Instagram chatbots is low right now. If you register and partner with Engati, you can easily get started. All you have to do is meet the following prerequisites:
1. Ensure that your account is a Professional account
When you open Instagram's settings, check whether you're already on a professional account. If not, you can easily switch to a profession account by following these steps:
Navigate to Edit profile on Instagram Web and click on ‘Switch to Professional Account.’
Select your type of profession, follow Instagram's wizard and you're sorted.
With the mobile app, go to Settings and tap on ‘Switch to Professional Account’
Select the type of account and type of business and save
2. Connect your Instagram professional account to a Facebook account and page
Now, you have to link your Instagram account to a Facebook page. Here's how:
Open the Instagram Mobile App and go to Settings. Click on Business and select option to ‘Connect or Create’
Login to the Facebook account, with which you want to connect your Instagram professional account
Connect to an existing Facebook page or create a new Facebook page.
Click on back or done and you will no longer see an option to Connect or Create
3. Toggle message availability for external apps
This setting can be completed only through Instagram Mobile App. Go to Settings and click on ‘Privacy’ and then ‘Messages’
Toggle the option ‘Allow Access to Messages’ to ON
After finishing the above steps, you can proceed to Engati portal and continue connecting your chatbot to Instagram
4. Setting up your chatbot
Now open Engati and go to Configure, then Deployment. Click on Connect button besides Instagram to setup the account.
Follow the setup wizard to connect your chatbot to Instagram, and click on ‘Continue Deployment’
Click on Sign In and you will be redirected to Facebook OAuth
Login with the Facebook username that was connected to your Instagram Business Account. Please check and unblock pop ups from your browser settings besides the URL name on top right.
Give permissions to Instagram business accounts to be connected. Click on Select All
Select the page(s) that have been connected to Instagram business account. If already integrated, click on ‘Edit Settings’ to add more pages
Click on Next, grant the requested permissions and click on Done
You will be redirected back to the Engati portal, where you will see the connected pages. Irrespective of pages selected, only the pages which have Instagram account connected will be displayed
Check one page and click on Connect button
Confirmation message will be shown and the page will be shown under Connected Pages
You can reauthroize, if the password is changed or to give permission for any additional pages. Clicking on Change Page, will ask user to select another page on which the bot is to be deployed. Change Page option will be disabled, if only one page is available. Your chatbot can be disabled by hovering on to the connected page and click on Disable button
Clicking on Enable will activate the bot and not data will be lost and configuration will be lost
Clicking on Remove will delete the configured user data and context. You can also Logout and remove the page and Sign in again from a different account. And that's it! That's all you need to get started!
Why are chatbots on Instagram essential for marketing?
Instagram is one of the most used social media platforms with more than 1 billion users and at least 200 million daily users. Instagram isn’t just limited to social engagements anymore. It’s become a great place to market brands. Celebrities, influencers, and companies have all realized the potential and leverage instagram to build their brands. Why not? It’s a direct access to your customer and target audience. And with new trends coming up everyday, it’s easier for brands to create relatable content for their customers. This makes it very easy for the brands to engage with their customers. While content drives engagement, it’s very important for brands to enhance engagement too. If a customer tries to reach out to a brand, it’s very important to pick up those conversations and keep them engaged throughout. But it can be difficult to do it manually for multiple customers. That’s where a chatbot comes in!
Apart from helping you with your engagement, you can also use it to send out promotional messages, new product launch details, personalized discounts etc. It’ll also help you collect data about your customers and audience which will help you shape your marketing campaigns better.
FAQs
1. Is there a chatbot for instagram?
Yes, Instagram chatbots can be built using Engati platform and can be deployed on 15 other channels along with Instagram
2. Who can create a chatbot on Instagram?
Anyone with a business account on Instagram can create a chatbot, irrespective of the followers you have. Creator accounts only below 500k can create a chatbot on their accounts. Irrespective of the account type it’s very important to ensure that your instagram account is linked to a facebook account and page to use a chatbot.
3. Can you create an Instagram chatbot on a personal Account?
It’s not possible to create an Instagram account on a Personal account. Only a business account and a creator account can create a chatbot.
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