If your store leverages Instagram to drive sales, you know it’s important to engage with every member of your community whether they’re commenting on your posts, engaging with your Story, or sending you a message.
Over 4,000 teams on Gorgias have been using our Instagram integration to respond to (or automate responses to) mentions, comments, and ad comments. Earlier this summer, some customers were able to also start receiving and responding to Instagram messages (but it was limited to accounts with between 1,000-100,000 followers).
Today, we’re excited to share that there’s no longer a follower requirement to use Instagram messaging!
Every Gorgias customer (with a non-legacy plan) can manage Instagram messages (including Story mentions) directly from your helpdesk, allowing you to engage with your shoppers quickly and efficiently so you never miss a conversation.
Plus you’ll also be able to reply to comments with a message, giving your team the option to turn a public conversation into a 1-1 chat.
Customers who were able to start using this feature early have already replied to over 300,000 messages and Story mentions. In fact, about 2% of tickets in Gorgias are Instagram messages!
It’s clear our customers love using Instagram to engage with their communities and drive sales, which is why we’re so excited to open this channel up for all of our merchants regardless of their follower count.
Related: Our list of the best social media apps for Shopify.
To get started, you’ll need to make sure you have the "Allow Access to Messages" setting active in Instagram.
You can do this In Instagram Business Messenger by going to Settings → Privacy → Messages and setting the toggle to active.
Once that’s done, go to the Integrations tab in your Gorgias helpdesk and select “Facebook, Messenger & Instagram.”
Click the green “Reconnect” button to refresh your settings, and then you’ll be able to enable “Instagram Direct Messages” in the checkboxes.
This will connect Messages and Story mentions to Gorgias, allowing you to reply directly from the helpdesk and see previous conversation history (so your agents have all the information they need right in one place).
The following video will show you how to get started, along with some common troubleshooting tips.
If you’re managing a lot of customer support conversations on Instagram, it may be helpful to set up views for each type of interaction. For example, you could have a view for Instagram comments, another for Instagram Messages, and a third for Instagram ad comments.
You can also use Rules and Macros in Gorgias to reply even faster (or automate conversations entirely!) in order to free up your agents to focus on more important conversations.
Here are a few ideas to get you started!
1. Create a Macro sending a message to say “Thanks for the mention!”
If you have customers that love to tag your brand or products in their own posts, an easy way to continue building brand loyalty is to send a quick “thank you.” To save your agents time, you can create a Macro they can re-use anytime you get a Message that you’ve been mentioned in someone’s story or post.
2. Adding tags to track Instagram Story mentions
If you want to track how often your brand is mentioned in Instagram Stories, you can tag tickets that come in from the Messages channel with “Mentioned you” in the message body.
By creating a Rule to do this, you can automate this process so it doesn’t add any extra time or steps into your agents workflow, but gives you powerful insights.
3. Creating a Rule to auto-reply to Instagram messages outside of business hours
If you don’t want to reply to messages 24/7, it may be helpful to create an auto-response to set some expectations outside of your business hours.
You can easily do this with a Rule, and even encourage your followers to go somewhere else in the meantime, such as your website, a specific landing page, or even a partner account!
Hopefully this gives you some inspiration on how you can start using Gorgias to engage with your Instagram community without increasing the workload on your support agents. And if you're interested in messaging customers directly, check out our social media and SMS features. With social media for customer service, you can interact with customers on platforms like Instagram or Facebook. And with SMS for customer service, you can enable texting for your most on-the-go customers.
Related: Lean how Gorgias customer Berkey Filters launched SMS and drove incredible customer adoption to this new, faster channel.
To start simplifying management of your messages, comments, and mentions, get started with Gorgias and add the Instagram integration today!
