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Connect an Instagram professional account and its direct messages, story replies and post comments arrive in Watx. DMs land in the shared Inbox against the same contacts as WhatsApp; comments get their own queue, because a comment is public, attached to a post, and has no thread. The channel is built for people who work a backlog after a post lands: a comment triage desk with keyboard shortcuts, comment-to-DM automations you can put on one post or on all of them, and the same automations and AI agents you already use elsewhere.

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What arrives

A reply you type in the Instagram app appears in the thread so the history is complete, but it deliberately does not start automations or an AI agent — otherwise the workspace would answer its own messages.

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How Instagram differs from WhatsApp

These are Meta’s rules, not settings, and most of the channel’s behaviour follows from them.
There is no compliant way to send bulk Instagram DMs, because there is no template mechanism to pre-approve them. Contacts who exist only on Instagram carry no phone number, so they are left out of broadcast audiences automatically.

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The two windows

The 24-hour reply window applies to DMs. You can reply freely for 24 hours after each message the customer sends. After that the thread closes until they write again. Watx refuses an out-of-window send before it reaches Meta and tells you why, rather than letting it fail silently. Some workspaces are on a deployment that holds Meta’s Human Agent permission, which extends this to 7 days; Channel Settings states which applies to yours. The 7-day private-reply window applies to comments. Meta allows exactly one private reply per comment, within 7 days of it being posted. That private reply is the only way to open a DM thread with somebody who has never messaged you — which is what comment funnels are built on. Both limits are permanent for a given comment, so Watx disables the DM button and names the reason instead of letting you write a message that will be refused.

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Contacts are not merged across channels

An Instagram identity carries no phone number, so there is no reliable way to tell that @someone is the same person as a number in your contact list. The same human on both channels is two contacts. Watx resolves the handle and display name so the Inbox shows a person rather than a numeric id.

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Where things live

Connect Instagram

What the account needs, the Business Login flow, and keeping access alive.

Posts and automation

Coverage across your posts, automating one or many, and moderating from a post.

Comments

The triage desk: filters, keyboard shortcuts, public replies and DMs.

Comment funnels

Comment a word, get the link in the DMs — the editor and its results.

DM agents

What answers an Instagram DM when nobody on your team has yet.

Intents

Keyword rules that reach both DMs and comments.

Settings and analytics

Subscribed events, messaging rules, the master switch and the overview report.