About Instagram Direct Messages
Instagram Direct Messages lets you send messages to your customers. You can receive text, pictures, videos and stories.
What does the Engage Instagram DM integration support?
- One-to-one messaging
- Incoming image attachments
- Stories
- Replies
- Receive GIFs
- Receive Stickers
- Send and receive Emojis
- User-deleted messages
- Easy to connect to Engage using your Facebook account (OAuth)
Features not supported:
- Videos
- Group messages
- Posts
- Mentions
- Shares
- Stories
- Shares
- Mentions
Instagram Direct Messages Setup
What kind of Instagram Account does a client need to talk to their customers?
Engage clients will need to have an Instagram Business Account and linked Facebook Business Page.
Please ensure that both accounts are linked to each other.
The Instagram account needs to have Instagram Direct Messages enabled:
- Open the Instagram App
- For your account go to Settings > Privacy > Messages
- Under ‘Connected Tools’ make you you Allow access to messages
Connecting your Instagram Business Account to Engage
- Login to your Engage environment and navigate to Admin Settings.
- Select the Channels tab and click Add New.
- Make sure you are logged into the personal Facebook account that has admin privileges for the business pages you wish to link. There is a link that lets you check if you are logged in.
- Click Continue to Facebook.
Follow the Facebook Flow.
Click on Edit previous settings.
Select which Instagram Business Accounts you want to use with Engage.
Select which Facebook Pages you want to use with Engage.
Please make sure you give Engage full permissions. Failure to do so will mean that we will be unable to link your account to Engage.
Click on Save.
The final step is to make sure the correct page is linked to Engage.
Select the Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts you want linked. Click on Done.
Customise contact flows based on Message Type
There are some use cases where an incoming message on Instagram should not trigger a bot flow. For example, an instagram story reply.
Engage customers have the power to manage which messages receive a bot answer with the instagram_story_reply attribute. Admins can then choose how to react in the contact flow (start a bot convo, route them to a seperate queue etc).