Build Your First LinktoDM Zap

A Zap on New Contact fires when LinktoDM creates a contact. So this walkthrough has two halves, and the first one is the half people skip: getting LinktoDM to produce contacts at all. A Zap that “never fires” is usually a Zap whose LinktoDM side was never doing anything.

We’ll publish an automation, watch a real contact appear in Contacts, and only then wire up Zapier.

Before you begin

• LinktoDM connected to Zapier
• An Instagram post or reel you can attach an automation to
• A second Instagram account that has never messaged you, to test with

Contacts come from your automations

You never add contacts by hand. LinktoDM creates one the first time somebody interacts with any automation you’ve published — and after that, every interaction updates the record it already has. That covers:

• a comment on a post or reel automation
• a story reply or reaction
• a DM that matches a flow trigger
• any step further into a flow, like a button tap

A contact is the person plus everything you’ve learned about them: username, when they last interacted, and any email, phone number, tags or custom fields your automations have collected.

Contacts on a fresh account — and the reason a brand-new Zap can sit there doing nothing

1. Publish an automation

Any published automation will do. If you already have one running, skip ahead — it’s already creating contacts.

The one below is a comment-to-DM automation named collectphoneemail: a specific post, a specific-word trigger, an AI public comment reply, and then a DM sequence that runs Collect email, Collect phone, and a message with the link.

One automation, three Zapier triggers: the interaction, the email, and the phone number

That shape is worth copying, because it feeds three trigger events off one automation:

What the contact does	What fires in Zapier
Comments the keyword for the first time	New Contact
Answers Collect email	New or Updated Email
Answers Collect phone	New or Updated Phone Number

Hit Publish when it’s ready.

Collect steps are optional for this Zap

New Contact fires on the interaction itself, so a bare comment-to-DM automation with no collect steps triggers it just fine. The collect steps are what make the email and phone triggers fire — add them when you want the contact record filled in, not just created.

2. Watch the contact land

From your second Instagram account, comment the trigger keyword on the post and answer the DM. Then open Contacts in the console.

A row per contact, with whatever your automations collected alongside it

A new row means the LinktoDM half works. Do this check before you build the Zap: if nothing appears here, the problem is in the automation and no amount of Zap configuration will fix it.

Test with an account that has never messaged you

New Contact fires on the first interaction only. Once someone is in Contacts they stay there, and further comments update Last interacted on rather than creating a second contact — so re-testing from the same account produces nothing. Use a fresh account, or test the other triggers instead.

3. Set the trigger

In a new Zap, choose LinktoDM as the trigger app and New Contact as the trigger event, pick your connected account, and click Continue. There’s nothing to configure — every first-time interaction counts.

4. Set the action

Add a second step. We’ll use Google Drive → Create Folder, named after the contact: a deliberately boring destination that makes it obvious at a glance whether the value came through. Swap in Google Sheets or your CRM once you trust it.

Step 2: the app, the action event, and the account it runs as

On Configure, set Drive to My Google Drive and pick an empty Parent Folder so the test results are easy to find.

5. Map the contact into it

Click into Folder Name, type a bit of fixed text, then open the data picker and choose Username from the LinktoDM step:

New Contact- [1. Username]

Fixed text plus a mapped value — the folder names itself after each contact

Anything from the trigger can go here, on its own or several at once — the full payload includes the name, email, phone number and a timestamp alongside the username.

6. Test, then publish

Test run uses a real recent event if Zapier has one — the contact you made in step 2 will do. Check the result in Google Drive: a folder named New Contact- theirusername means all four links held. The interaction created a contact, LinktoDM fired the event, Zapier caught it, and the action ran.

Publish turns it on. From here it runs by itself, within seconds of each new contact.

Reuse the pattern

Change either end and the middle stays identical:

New or Updated Email  → map Email        → add a subscriber in Mailchimp
New Tagged Contact    → map Tag Name     → create an invite in Calendly
Custom Field updated  → map Custom Field → post a message in Slack

You should now have

A published automation that creates contacts, a contact you watched arrive in Contacts, and a live Zap writing each new one into a real destination — plus the mapping pattern every other LinktoDM trigger reuses.

Next: Sync custom field changes to Zapier