The Instagram Automation Checklist You Can Actually Work Through

Most posts called a checklist are an essay with numbers stuck on the paragraphs. This one is meant to be worked through with something to tick. Skip the sections that do not apply to where you are.

Before you connect anything

• Your Instagram account is a professional account — Business or Creator, both work
• It is linked to a Facebook Page, which is Meta's requirement and the most common day-one blocker
• You know who owns that Page, and it is not a former employee's personal profile
• There is more than one admin on it
• You have read two weeks of your own sent replies and can name four answers that cover most of them
• If you could not name four, you have decided not to buy anything yet — that is a valid outcome

Before you build the first automation

• You have picked exactly one repetitive question to start with
• You have collected the actual phrasings people type for it, not the one you would type — price, price?, kitne ka, cost kya hai
• You know matching ignores case and punctuation, so you are collecting phrasings rather than spellings
• You have written the public reply as a receipt, not an answer: a few words pointing at the DM
• You have written the private reply in the register you actually use
• not interested is in your negative keywords, along with refund, cancel, broken, worst, galat
• Capture to Leads is on

Before you go live

• You ran Test on myself and received the reply on your own account
• You read that reply on a phone, as the recipient, not on the desktop preview
• It sounds like you. If it does not, you rewrote it rather than shipping it
• Quiet hours are set in your audience's timezone, not yours
• The automation is scoped to specific posts, unless it is deliberately your one broad catch-all
• You have decided whether first-time senders only should be on
• You know where the kill switch is and who else is allowed to press it

The first day live

• You went live on one post, not all of them
• You opened Activity and switched to Blocked before the day ended
• A stack of window refusals did not alarm you — those are older posts, working as intended
• Duplicate refusals did not alarm you either — Instagram redelivers events
• You checked connection is not appearing at all, because that means nothing is sending
• You read three sent replies end to end

Weekly

• Read Activity filtered to Blocked, by shape rather than row by row
• Rising takeover means you are answering faster by hand than the automation, and it should be narrower
• cooldown and rate_budget together on one post is a viral post being throttled correctly — leave it
• content_safety refusals are worth reading individually, because they passed all nine checks before it
• Work the review queue for patterns, not just approvals — the same question arriving repeatedly means write a template
• Check Leads has entries you would actually follow up, and export the CSV if you work them elsewhere
• Read two sent replies as a stranger would

Monthly

• Open the automation list and turn off everything built for a campaign that has ended
• For each survivor, say out loud the sentence a real person types that it exists to answer
• Check no two automations are competing for the same events — one event produces one reply, and the loser looks dead
• Re-read your grounding sources against the current business, and delete anything that stopped being true
• Re-read your negative keyword list and remove the ones added in a panic that no longer earn their place
• Check credits against actual usage

• If credits are draining fast, the fix is usually a missing template rather than a bigger pack
• Free tier is 100 credits with no card; packs start at ₹499 when you need them

When something looks wrong

• Can you send a DM by hand from the Instagram app? If yes, your account is fine and it is the connection
• Does the connection read healthy, not merely present? An expired token still shows the account name
• Is the automation actually enabled, or was it switched off and forgotten
• Is a broader automation eating the events this one should be getting
• Does Activity show a refusal, and which check is named
• Remember you only ever see the first failure in the order — a window refusal can be hiding others behind it
• The connection and restriction post covers which of the two problems you have

The things not to tick, because they do not exist

• There is no scheduling, publishing, caption tool, hashtag tool or content calendar here
• There is no analytics product, no A/B testing and no competitor analysis
• There is no WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram
• There is no CRM sync and no Zapier — leads leave as CSV
• You cannot message anyone who has not messaged you first, on any plan, ever

The one that is not a checkbox

Read twenty of your own automated replies on a phone, as the person receiving them. Nothing in the product can judge that, no gate check covers it, and it is the only thing that decides whether any of the above was worth doing.

If you are still setting up, the week-one guide is paced for this. If you are months in, the advanced post covers overlaps and grounding.