What is a chatbot?

1. Someone does something the bot can respond to: sends a DM, taps a button, comments on a post or mentions the account in a Story.
2. Meta sends that event to the bot’s server through a webhook, as a short block of data.
3. The bot decides what to say. A rule matches a keyword or a button, or an AI model drafts an answer from the information it was given.
4. The reply goes back through Meta’s Send API and appears in the chat like any other message.

The plumbing is the same for a two-line auto-reply and an elaborate menu. What makes a bot helpful or maddening is step three, and how quickly it passes the chat to a person when it’s out of its depth. Meta’s platform has a handover feature for exactly that, which passes a conversation between apps, such as from a bot to a team inbox.

The idea is much older than social media. ELIZA, written at MIT in the mid-1960s, kept people talking by matching patterns in what they typed and turning their own words back into questions. Plenty of DM bots still work on that principle: spot a word, send a prepared answer.

Most accounts do best with both: rules for the questions they know are coming, AI for the long tail, and a person behind the two. In DMFast, AI replies are written only from the business information the owner provides, on the Growth and Business plans, at one credit per reply.

• Reply rather than start. On Instagram, a conversation begins only when the person reaches out first, by DM, comment, Story mention or a similar route. Mass DMs to followers who never wrote aren’t possible through official tools.
• Answer within 24 hours of the person’s last message. The human agent tag stretches that to 7 days, but only for support from real people, not for automated or marketing messages.
• Send one private reply per comment, within 7 days of the comment. For comments made during an Instagram Live, that reply has to go out while the Live is running.
• Talk to one person per conversation. Instagram’s messaging API doesn’t support group chats.
• Run on professional accounts and Pages only: Instagram Business and Creator accounts and Facebook Pages, not personal profiles.
• Stay under speed limits, such as 750 private replies to comments an hour on one Instagram account.

• No way out. Someone who types “human” and gets the same menu again will leave. Offer a person, and say roughly when they’ll answer.
• Pretending to be a person. A bot that signs off as “Sam from the team” and then can’t handle a follow-up costs more trust than one that says it’s automated.
• Guessing. An AI bot that invents a delivery date or a discount makes a promise you then have to honour or take back. Give it the facts and let it pass on what it doesn’t know.
• Menus that go too deep. If the price is three taps away, move it to the first screen.
• Keywords that are too common. A rule that fires on “hi” or “info” answers half your inbox; choose a word people only type when they mean it.
• Selling to applause. A heart emoji or a quick “thanks” doesn’t need a pitch in return.