Triggers & Keywords

The trigger card is the top of the flow builder. It answers three questions: what kind of event, on which media, and containing which words.

Trigger types

Trigger	Fires when	Media picker	Public replies
User comments on your post or reel	Someone comments on a post or reel	Post / reel, or all posts	Yes
User DMs to you	Someone sends a direct message	—	No
User comments on your LIVE	Someone comments during a live	Live, or all lives	No
User replies to your stories	Someone replies to a story	Story, or all stories	No

User mentions you in story is listed as Coming Soon and can't be selected yet.

Once picked, the trigger shows as a chip. Use the ✕ on the chip to change it — that also clears the media selection, keywords and comment replies, since they don't carry across trigger types.

Comment vs DM triggers

The difference matters more than it looks:

• Comment and live triggers start outside the inbox. Instagram allows exactly one private reply per comment, so these flows must have an opening message if they have any response steps, and the rest of the flow waits for the person to tap it.
• DM and story-reply triggers start inside the inbox. The person messaged you first, so the messaging window is already open and the response steps can run straight away. An opening message is optional here.

See Instagram's Messaging Rules.

Choosing the media

For comment, live and story triggers, the picker asks which piece of media to watch:

• All Posts / All Lives / All Stories — the flow fires on every one.
• A specific item — pick a tile from your recent media.

Tiles that another flow of the same trigger type already watches are flagged and locked out. Two flows on the same post would try to answer the same commenter twice, and only one private reply is ever allowed. The flow you're currently editing is never flagged against itself.

Stories expire

Instagram stories disappear after 24 hours. A story-reply flow pinned to a specific story stops matching once that story is gone — point it at All Stories if you want it to keep running.

Keywords

Click Setup Keywords to open the keyword editor.

• Matching is case-insensitive and matches anywhere in the text. The keyword link matches "LINK", "please send the link!" and "linked".
• Add up to 20 keywords, each up to 60 characters. A keyword can be a phrase.
• Duplicates are flagged as you type — since matching ignores case, Link and link are the same entry — and the editor won't let you confirm until they're resolved.
• An empty keyword list matches everything. Leave it empty when you want to reply to every comment or every DM.

Keywords are matched against the comment text for comment triggers, and the message body for DM and story-reply triggers.

Public comment replies

Available on the post or reel trigger only.

Click Setup Comment Replies and add up to 10 replies, each up to 280 characters. When the flow fires, InfluDM posts one of them at random as a public reply under the comment — so a thread of a hundred triggered comments doesn't show the same sentence a hundred times.

Good replies acknowledge and point at the DM:

Sent! Check your DMs 💌
Just messaged you ✨
On its way — look in your inbox 📩

Leave the list empty to skip the public reply entirely and go straight to the DM.

Your own replies can't re-trigger the flow

Events authored by the connected account are ignored, so the public reply InfluDM posts never fires the flow again — even when it repeats the keyword.

What doesn't trigger a flow

Several things are filtered out before keyword matching happens:

• Comments from the connected account itself.
• Replies underneath another comment. Only top-level comments start an automation, so a conversation in the replies can't re-fire it.
• A comment that already triggered a flow. Each comment gets exactly one run, even if Instagram redelivers the webhook.
• Events for a paused Instagram account, or for a workspace that has used up its contact allowance.
• Messages already being consumed by a conversation in progress — for example an answer to a lead-form question is not also matched as a DM keyword.

Multiple flows on one account

Several flows can be active at once. For a given event, InfluDM checks each active flow of the matching trigger type in turn, skipping those whose media or keywords don't match.

For comment events, the first match wins and the rest are skipped — the single allowed private reply is already spent. For DM and story triggers there is no such limit, so keep keyword lists distinct to avoid answering the same person twice.