r/MarketingAutomation

TL;DR: Meta gives you exactly one automated DM per comment. And the messaging window only opens if the person taps or replies to it. A DM with just a link in it doesn't count, so you can never follow up.

This is the bit that catches everyone out.

You set up comment-to-DM. Someone comments your keyword. The bot sends them the lead magnet. Job done, except now you can't message them again, ever, and you don't know why.

What's actually happening

The 24-hour conversation window doesn't open when you send the DM. It opens when they respond to it. A tap on a quick reply, a button that continues the flow, a typed message.

A link-only button doesn't do it. Neither does a plain message with nothing to press.

So the flow ends there. No follow-up, no qualifying questions, no handoff to a human.

What to put in that first DM instead

• One message, with one thing to tap. "Great, send it 💛" works fine.
• Deliver the actual thing after they tap, not before.
• Don't waste the message on a greeting. You get one.
• One question maximum. Three questions gets you no answer at all.

Once they've tapped, the window is open and you can branch, tag, ask about budget, or hand them to a person.

The other limits worth knowing

• One comment-triggered DM per comment, within 7 days of the comment being posted
• Follow-ups only after they respond, and within 24 hours of that response
• Around 750 API calls an hour for comment-to-DM on posts and Reels
• Live video replies only work during the broadcast itself

Two small things

Use specific keywords. "PRICE" or "LOOKBOOK" beat "info" or "help", which fire on comments that have nothing to do with your offer. And add the common typos, because LOKBOOK won't match an exact-string trigger.

Also: if you serve audiences in California or Germany, you have to tell people upfront they're talking to a bot.

Full setup walkthrough:

https://sendpulse.com/blog/instagram-comment-automation

What keyword are you using? I keep seeing LINK and INFO, and INFO in particular seems like it'd fire on half your comment section.

Reddit has been a major growth channel for most of my side projects, every single day i spend 2-3 hours at different times to do marketing and outreach on Reddit, it's a gold mine, 75% of all my revenue comes from it, but as a soloprenuer i'm getting overwhelmed and obviously i can't cover all leads manually and by myself, so i finally got to building a tool to automate this whole thing for me.

ReplyHey - I just launced it and have delegated all my reddit marketing and outreach to it and boy is it a relief.

- 30 secs to set up, just enter your domain.

- It finds leads for you, you can reach out to them yourself (comment or DM) or you can use the tailored human-sounding draft that's ready for you via a copy and comment or copy and DM button.

- The best part now: the Automation - there's 2 ways you can use this: 1. connect ReplHey's MCP and copy/paste a prompt to your agent which will run an automated session and does all the outreach and 2. via a chrome extension, pick whatever you're comfortable with, i do both.

- Note that leads includes the free promo threads too, those are great to build SEO and get visibility too.

- It has a posts calendar so you can schedule and track your content distribution + an auto generation flow.

- It has brand sentiment and keywords monitoring too.

- Ofcourse the MCP, which i already mentioned, you can use it in more ways than just 'pull leads and start automation', you can ask it to give you a roadmap of what to post and where and when, you can also just set up your site through it and in general run the whole reddit marketing from your claude/cursor or whatever tool you're on.

- Now regarding safety and bans and blocks and all that: the interactions are throttled, it's not blindly blasting comments and DMs right and left, it is throttled which means it can take a bit of time to run outreach to like 150 leads for example, but you don't care, let it run and go do your other work lol.

That's about it, pls do check it out, there will be comments about 'AI tools like this is blasphemy bla bla' pls note that the goal here is to automate what you already manually do, and also note you're in full control, you're not comfortable with automation? np, get the leads and contact them yourself, you're not comfortable with finding leads? np, just don't try to run a SaaS or a product anymore, go run a charity instead..

Thanks all

Creative teams waste hours hunting assets across Drive, Dropbox, Adobe, Frame.io, and email. We built Adey to fix that.

Natural‑language search for assets
Visual workflows: review → approval → publish
One workspace for comments, versions, and final assets

For: marketing/creative teams, content studios, and agencies.
We’re looking for first teams to run this in production with guided onboarding.

If you want to see it, I’ll drop the link in the comments / it’s in my profile.

Short version: from October 1, Meta bills you for every free-form reply your team or chatbot sends on WhatsApp. Including the ones that say nothing.

TL;DR

• Service messages (free-form replies within 24h of a customer writing in) become billable October 1. They've been free since November 2024.
• Utility templates sent inside that same window also become billable.
• API only. The regular WhatsApp app and the free Business app aren't touched.

Quick check whether this is your problem

• WhatsApp Business API, directly or through a provider → yes, this is you.
• Normal WhatsApp app → no.
• Free WhatsApp Business app → no.

What it'll cost

Service messages get priced like utility templates for that country. Today's rates:

• US $0.0064
• Brazil $0.0098
• Mexico $0.0115
• UK $0.0264
• India $0.0024

Meta confirms the real numbers by September 1, so treat these as estimates.

Worth running your own volume through it though. 5,000 conversations a month at six replies each is 30,000 messages. All free right now. From October that's roughly $294 in Brazil, or $792 in the UK.

Some relief: marketing and authentication templates don't change, they were already billed. Messages customers send you are never billed. And chats that start from a Click-to-WhatsApp ad or a Facebook Page CTA keep their 72-hour free window.

Five things worth doing before October

1. Delete the filler. "One moment." "Thanks!" "Let me check that." Billing is per message, not per character, so a message that says nothing costs the same as a real answer.
2. Combine replies. A WhatsApp message holds 4,096 characters. Splitting one answer across three messages now costs 3x.
3. Swap open-text questions for buttons, and use WhatsApp Flows to grab several fields in one go instead of asking one at a time.
4. Cap how often a trigger can re-fire, and kill any catch-all standard reply that answers every inbound message.
5. Set a daily AI reply limit per subscriber if you use AI in your flows. Those replies bill as service messages and eat your AI provider's tokens on top.

Full breakdown here:

https://sendpulse.com/blog/whatsapp-service-message-pricing

Anyone been through their flows for this yet? Curious how much filler people are finding, I suspect it's more than anyone expects.

TL;DR: Don't send to a dormant list all at once. Verify it, then go out in batches of about 10%, and watch bounces. Over 10% bounce in a single campaign and your account can get blocked, temporarily or permanently.

The instinct with a list you haven't mailed in a year is to write something good and send it to everyone. That's the part that goes wrong. It isn't the copy, it's the volume of dead addresses hitting at once.

Order of operations

1. Verify before you segment. Old lists collect addresses that no longer exist. Bounces are what damage your domain reputation, and they're invisible until you send. Run the list through a verifier and strip the invalid ones out first.
2. Segment the inactive contacts into their own group. Conditions like "didn't open recent emails" with a message count, or "didn't open since [date]" for a time window. Keep them separate so you can send to them gradually and watch what happens.
3. Go out in batches, starting at roughly 10%. Send, then stop and look. If bounces stay under 10% and spam complaints under 0.5%, send the next batch. If not, you've just learned something cheaply instead of expensively.
4. Don't lead with a discount. A three-email warm-up works better: remind them who you are and when they signed up, then let them choose what they want to hear about, then offer something. Discount first reads like a stranger asking for money.
5. Make leaving easy on purpose. A clear unsubscribe link, ideally a page where they can drop one topic instead of everything. An unsubscribe costs you a contact. A spam complaint costs you deliverability.
6. Then actually delete the ones who never respond. This is the step people skip. Continuing to mail people who ignore everything is the behaviour that gets you filed as spam. Archive or remove them.

Setup details for each step are in the full guide:

https://sendpulse.com/blog/how-to-create-reengage-inactive-customers

Curious what people's cutoff is. How long does someone have to ignore you before you'd delete them rather than try again?

Curious how others are handling this.

We’re building seeki.eu a pan-European AI property marketplace. We always knew content and link building would be part of the job. The difficult part is doing that while also trying to build the actual product.

We’ve been sitting under 20k impressions for few months now. At the same time, we have over 400k pages that have been crawled but aren’t indexed. My AI agents are telling me that it's because our domain not having a good authority (and bing tools are outright saying we lack backlinks from high quality domains). Which makes sense, Google won't go full throttle on a new website nobody knows about. They suggested writing blogs posts which will be cited on other portals and sending them manually to news outlets (does anyone do that?). But same like Google, why would they cite a brand new website nobody knows?

We also use Clarity to monitor citations, and after we added some new articles (optimized for AEO) to Google’s index, we started seeing a few of them show up in AI-search citations the following week (the speed of it was quite surprising).

One thing I find especially annoying is the indexing workflow. Every time we publish a new blog post, we have to go into GSC and manually request indexing (even though we have sitemaps, but it takes Google ages to get it from sitemap). There seems to be a fairly small quota too, around 10 URLs for us. I haven’t found a proper way to automate this for normal blog posts.

Is everyone just doing this manually, or is there a better workflow?

More generally, what tools are small teams using for:

• content planning and writing
• social publishing
• link building and outreach
• monitoring mentions or AI-search citations
• finding relevant discussions to participate in
• tracking whether any of it is actually working

There are plenty of tools for individual parts of this, but I haven’t found anything that feels particularly practical for a 1–5 person team that is also busy building the product.

I’m not looking for another list of enterprise marketing platforms. I’m more interested in what people are actually using day to day, including spreadsheets, scripts, manual processes, or combinations of smaller tools.

I got tired of manually checking competitors' Facebook/Instagram ads every week.

So I built an n8n workflow that basically does the whole thing for me.

Every Monday it:

1. Searches the Meta Ad Library for the competitors/keywords I specify
2. Pulls the ads automatically
3. Extracts the advertiser, ad copy, CTA, platforms, dates, links, etc.
4. Sends the ads to OpenAI to identify messaging angles, offers, CTAs and notable new ads
5. Emails me a weekly competitor report
6. Saves the individual ads to Google Sheets so I can actually dig through them later

I'm sharing the entire n8n workflow for free because I figured other people here might find it useful.

GitHub: n8n/Weekly Competitor Ad Research.json at main · RandomDudeAtNight/n8n

The workflow is basically:

n8n → Apify → Meta Ad Library → OpenAI → Gmail + Google Sheets

I made the n8n workflow reusable, so you can change the search terms, country, ad count and active/all status without rebuilding anything.

For example, you could put:

Competitor A, Competitor B, Competitor C

into the config and let it continuously build your own little competitor ad database.

You'll need your own Apify token, OpenAI account and Gmail/Google Sheets credentials.

The Apify part is powered by a Facebook Ad Library scraper, but I wanted the actual workflow to be completely transparent rather than just saying "use my scraper."

If you're doing paid acquisition, I'd be curious:

What are you currently doing to keep track of competitor ads?

Manually checking Ad Library? Spreadsheets? Some expensive competitive-intelligence tool? Or have you already automated it?