An automation is a rule attached to one post on a connected Instagram or Facebook account. When somebody writes the keyword you chose, a private message goes out carrying a short link minted for that one send. Between the trigger and the link sit two optional steps: asking for a follow, and asking for an email address.
A rule lives on top of one post
The first thing to understand is where a rule sits, because almost every later answer falls out of it. An automation is not an account setting and not a global switch: it is a row pointing at one connected account, one post and one trigger. That trio is unique, so you cannot end up with two rules fighting over the same comment.
The post is picked from a list. There is no identifier to copy from anywhere and no URL to paste, because the account's posts are already there with their thumbnail and their first line of caption. It is a small interface decision that removes the most common mistake in this category of tool, which is wiring the rule to the post next door.
Comment rules also carry a scope, and the third one is the interesting one:
- This post, the one you just picked, and nothing else.
- Any post on the account, for a keyword you use permanently, such as the name of your catalogue.
- The next post you publish, which attaches itself to a piece that does not exist yet. This is how you set a launch up on Thursday for something going out on Friday morning without having to open anything on the day.
How the whole thing is assembled, step by step and with the screen in front of you, is on the Auto DM page.
The three triggers, and what changes between them
There are three ways a person can set a rule off, and they are not interchangeable: each one lives in a different place on the platform and each one allows different things.
| Trigger | Where it works | What it allows beyond the message |
|---|---|---|
| A comment carrying the keyword | Instagram and Facebook | A public reply under the comment, an opening message, and a choice of scope |
| A reply to a story | Instagram only | A reaction to the story, and the rule can attach to one story or to all of them |
| A direct message with the keyword | Instagram and Facebook | Nothing public: the person is already in the inbox, so the conversation starts where they are |
The middle row is the one most people assume works on both networks, and it does not. Messenger has no story reply event at all, so a rule of that shape on a Facebook account is not half saved, it is refused outright. A clear no beats a rule that never fires and that you spend a month waiting on.
The top row carries a detail worth knowing before you design anything. Meta allows one private reply per comment, and only within seven days. A call that fails spends it anyway. That is why the send slot is reserved before anything goes outward: a public "sent you a DM" with no DM behind it is worse than silence, and it is the reason the public reply and the message travel together rather than in two steps.
That public reply accepts several wordings of yours, and the one that goes out is chosen from the send itself rather than at random. It is an odd decision to explain and an easy one to appreciate: when the platform retries a delivery, which it does, the retry writes exactly the same words. A coin toss would have left two different replies hanging off the same comment, which is the fastest way to make a public thread look carelessly automated.
The follow gate asks, it does not verify
This is where most of the category oversells, so it is worth being exact. If you switch the gate on, the message asks for a follow before it releases the link, and the person confirms by tapping the button the message carries. That is their declaration, not our verification.
The reason is the platform's rather than a design choice. Instagram only answers the question "does this person follow you" about somebody who has already written to the account, and not even always; in the normal case the answer is that it does not know. Selling a lookup against the follower list would be selling a shrug. So it asks instead.
Two practical consequences. The first is that the gate exists on Instagram only: on a Facebook account there is no relationship to read, and switching it on would leave people waiting for an answer nobody can give. The second is that it deliberately barely insists. The rule asks three times at most, counting the first, and then falls silent for good in that conversation. Somebody who does not want to follow you gets the ask, two reminders and nothing further, which is the difference between a gate and a bot that argues.
The short link is minted for each send
Every message carries its own link, of the shape gofeedapp.com/r/ plus a ten character
code. Not one per rule and not one per destination: one per delivery, and if you schedule a
follow up pointing somewhere else, that follow up gets its own.
It sounds like a technical footnote and it is in fact the whole measurement story. Because the link was handed to exactly one person, saying "this send was opened" needs no cookie, no IP address, no browser fingerprint and nothing at all that follows anybody beyond the link itself. The number is true by construction rather than by statistical inference.
The code uses an alphabet with no zeros, letter Os, ones, lower case Ls or Is in it, because a short link ends up read aloud or typed by hand more often than anyone expects. And the redirect is temporary rather than permanent, precisely so the destination stays a field you can edit: if you change the page you send people to tomorrow, the links already sitting in half the world's inboxes keep working and keep counting.
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeThe contact ceiling stops nothing
The automation's contacts are the one soft quota in the product, and it is worth understanding what that means because it differs from most of the market. The workspace's other four quotas are hard ceilings: you reach them and that is that. This one is not. Sends carry on, nobody is left without their link, and whatever goes past the ceiling arrives as a line on your invoice, priced per contact.
The ceiling is not on every tier either. The entry plan of each audience carries one and the tiers above it do not, so for most workspaces the right sentence is not "careful not to go over" but that there is nothing to be careful about. The current figures live on the pricing page, which reads the catalogue live, which is why they are not printed here. The reasoning behind charging this way, and why cutting a campaign off halfway never looked defensible, is set out in why we do not charge per contact.
How to write a rule that does not annoy anyone
The keyword is the most underrated decision of the lot. An ordinary word turns the automation into noise: choose "info" and anybody typing "any info?" on a thread from three weeks ago receives a sales message they never asked for. An invented word that is easy to type, printed in the caption with instructions, filters by itself and leaves nobody guessing.
The email step has a deliberate limit. The rule asks for an address twice at most and then sends the link regardless. A contact is worth more than an email address, and somebody who has written back twice without giving one has answered the question in their own way.
And after the send there is an open conversation, which is the part most people forget. The thread lands in the inbox alongside the comments and reviews from every other network, with its 24 hour clock on top, which is the window Meta itself imposes for replying outside a template. How that queue holds up once the rules are working is covered in the social inbox, and the craft of answering without sounding like a machine is in DM management. An automation that opens a hundred conversations and leaves ninety unanswered is not a campaign, it is a list of people you have disappointed in private.