Are you scratching your head wondering what a chatbot is, let alone Instagram Chatbots? You might want to check out this blog post first.
In the last 12 months, The Creative Collective have watched and participated in the rise of the chatbot. Using chatbots for competitions and customer connections is fast becoming the norm as our lives increasingly play out over the internet.
While Facebook and Messenger chatbots have helped to streamline interactions between people and businesses, enhancing customer experiences and leaving business owners and staff time to focus on other aspects of the business, a lot of our clients have been wondering whether they could mirror these results within an Instagram specific chatbot.
What’s the Story?
Until recently, Instagram’s Platform Policy had been very strict about allowing third party tools to be connected.
Instagram rulings stated that you had to ensure your comments were uniquely tailored for each person, making it difficult to automate messages without being flagged as spam. You were also unable to let your business account take more than one action on Instagram at a time, making automations highly difficult to achieve.
Many third party apps attempted to circumvent the rules but were eventually shut down by Instagram.
While we did have a remedy for chatbot competitions, involving Facebook and Instagram ads linking through to a specific chatbot entry page, we were still unable to provide the ease and fun of entering a competition or talking to a business from the safety and comfort of your own Instagram DMs.
Jumping forward to midway through 2021, it was announced that Instagram will now finally be allowing chatbot automations to function within the app. The Creative Collective team are stoked by this announcement and are very keen to get down to business, learning all the tricks of the trade and then using them to support your digital marketing objectives.
Why So Exciting?
All you need to do is look at the stats to understand why our team is so pumped:
- Instagram has 1 billion active users every month. And 500 million users are using Instagram stories every day.
- Instagram is the perfect location for organisations targeting young people. 71% of the one billion Instagram users are under the age of 35.
- 50% of Instagram users follow at least one company and 80% decide whether to buy a product or service while on Instagram.
- 89% of Instagram users have bought something that they first saw on the platform.
What can Instagram Chatbots do for my business?
Think this all sounds pretty cool but unsure how it affects your business specifically?
There are plenty of features from chatbots that would lend themselves particularly well to forming connections and communities on Instagram.
Quick Replies
Remember ‘choose your own adventure’ stories? Well with the new Instagram Chatbot automations, you can essentially allow users to click through a number of key organisational messages that are pre prepared by you.
This gives your audience freedom of choice, a speedy response and more reasons to interact with you on Instagram.
User Inputs
This is a great feature for building your email database – especially for those in the ecommerce sector, or those that rely on regular email marketing to communicate with target audiences.
With the user input feature, you can collect email addresses from Instagram DMs and have them automatically saved and organised within your bot.
But it’s not just email! You can also set up your chatbot to capture any user data such as their name, phone number and other contact information that you deem important to your business activities.
This is an amazing upgrade for lead generation and collection for organisations with strong audience bases on Instagram.
Competitions
Up until recently, Instagram did not allow you to create chatbot competitions within the app.
However, now you can ask users to comment a specified keyword on a competition post within the news feed and then finalise their entry in messages.
You can also ask users to DM you a certain keyword directly and then automate the entry and data collection process.
Essentially, the sky’s the limit here and we are so excited to show you what you can do.
Automated Product Quizzes
Marketing automation trends have shown that product quizzes are popular this year. Imagine you have a product line with 4-5 items and you want to give customers the best product option for them.
By creating an automated quiz, you can step potential customers through a number of questions. You can firm up on their specific wants and needs, and then provide them with the best solution.
We have seen case studies where 60% of quiz participants go on to convert into sales on the website. And best of all, this is essentially organic traffic and means zero ad spend from your pocket!
Online Event Registrations and Reminders
We have also seen the power of chatbots in gaining registrations for webinars and online events. They are also great for sending event reminders to those already signed up.
Sounds amazing, how do we get started?
Hold your horses! Right now, Instagram is rolling out these automations quite slowly. Tentative dates from Facebook for Instagram automation availability are shown below, but don’t be surprised if they do change.
- June 2, 2021 All accounts with 10k-100k followers
- July 1, 2021 All accounts with 1k-100k followers
- August 1 — all accounts
Good news: If you don’t have enough followers right now, we can create a test account on your behalf to test out the features of Instagram automation and prepare for when these options go live for all Instagram business accounts.
If you are interested in learning more about our automation and chatbot services, please check out the links below. Then, get in touch with one of our Account Managers who will happily discuss your specific marketing objectives.
Misty View Cottages Chatbot Competition Case Study