How Chat Automation Works

LinktoDM has three quick automations, and they’re told apart by where the person is when they set one off:

Automation	Fires when someone…
Post automation	Comments on your post or reel
Story automation	Replies to, reacts to, or mentions your story
Chat automation	Sends a keyword straight to your inbox

Chat automation — 'replies to keywords sent in DMs' — is the third of the quick automations

A chat automation has no post and no story attached to it. It watches your inbox, and when an incoming message contains one of your keywords it answers and takes over the conversation from there.

What a chat conversation is made of

The chat editor isn’t the automation editor with cards, and it isn’t the flow canvas. It’s a script, written top to bottom in the order the conversation happens:

1. A trigger — the keyword or keywords that start the script.
2. Steps — each step is one message you send, up to 590 characters.
3. Choices (optional) — buttons under a message. Add them and each choice gets its own branch with its own next message.
4. A collect field (optional) — after a step, ask for an Email, a Phone number or Any answer, and the reply is validated and saved.

You add steps with Add Step and it grows downward. The phone on the right plays the whole thing back as a DM thread while you type, which is the fastest way to notice a script that reads like a form.

When to use one

Chat automation is the answer to “DM me the word BOOK” — the call to action that lives in your bio, your captions, your story stickers, and on the slide at the end of a reel. The person has to message you first, so:

• Bio and link-in-bio CTAs — “DM us PRICING” is a chat automation, not a post automation, because there’s no comment involved.
• A front desk for the inbox — greet everyone who says hello and route them to the right answer with choices.
• Lead capture — walk someone through email, then phone, then name, saving each answer to Contacts as it arrives.
• A menu of products — list what you sell as buttons and let people pick.

Reach for a post automation instead whenever the trigger is a comment, and the Flow builder when you need conditions, delays, tags or a payment step — a chat script runs straight through and can’t branch on who the person is, only on which button they tapped.

What it doesn’t have

Coming from a post automation, four things are missing, and their absence is the point rather than a gap:

• No public reply. There’s no comment to reply under.
• No post or story to choose. The keyword is the whole trigger.
• No opener message. An opener exists to get someone to interact before you send a link — in a chat automation they already have.
• No separate Collect info step. Collecting is built into the script itself, attached to whichever step asks the question.

They message you first, so the window is already open

Instagram lets you reply for 24 hours after someone’s last message. A chat automation always starts from an inbound DM, so that clock is running from the moment they typed your keyword — and a script that waits for an answer that never comes will run out of time rather than hang around.

Ready to build one — Create a chat automation.