Playbooks · 5 min read
The Local Business Playbook for Instagram Comments and DMs
The version of this post that gets written most often promises bookings on autopilot. We should deal with that immediately, because it is not something this product does.
There is no calendar integration. Nothing here can see your diary, your table plan, your chairs, or your slots, and therefore nothing here should ever tell a customer that a time is theirs. There is also no CRM sync, no WhatsApp, and no scheduling or publishing — we reply to people, we do not create posts.
What is left is genuinely useful, and it is worth being precise about what it is: a local business inbox is a FAQ with a clock attached. The FAQ part is why automation works. The clock is why it matters.
Start by counting, not by building
Before touching the builder, scroll back three or four weeks of comments and DMs and tally what people actually asked. Not what you imagine they ask — what is there.
Almost every local account finds the same shape. A small number of questions account for most of the volume, and they are dull: hours, address, parking, price of the one thing everyone wants the price of, do you deliver, are you open on the holiday, do you have it in stock, can I come now.
Then a long tail of genuinely different messages, most of which deserve a person.
That tally is your build plan. If four questions cover most of your inbox, then four templates cover most of your inbox, and templated replies are free and unlimited — a credit is spent only when the AI writes a new reply.
The work is not writing clever replies. It is finding out that you have been typing the same nine sentences for two years.
Sort every answer into fixed, moving, or refused
Fixed. True today, true in November, true regardless of who asked. Hours, location, parking, languages, whether you take cards, which delivery platforms you are on. These are templates and they are the whole point.
Moving. True right now and false soon. Today's stock, this week's offer, the festival timing, the price of anything seasonal. These get temporary automations with a switch-off date decided the day you create them, never an edit to an evergreen template. The most common self-inflicted wound in local automation is a Sunday-brunch template still cheerfully running on Wednesday.
Refused. Anything where a confident wrong answer costs somebody real money, time or safety. Every trade has its own list and it is short and non-negotiable. For food it is allergies and complaints. For anything clinical it is symptoms and prices. For a shop it is whether a perishable item is on the shelf right now. Put those words in negative keywords, which stops the reply going out at all, and let a human take it.
Build on comments before DMs
Comments are the easier surface for a local business and the one most owners skip, because DMs feel more personal and therefore more urgent.
Two reasons to start with comments. The window is seven days rather than twenty-four hours, so a mistake is recoverable and a slow week does not cost you the conversation. And a comment question is usually public, which means the person asking is one of several people who wanted to know — answering it in the open does work that a DM cannot.
The shape that works is the comment-to-DM flow: a short public reply that says you have sent the details, and a private reply that contains them. Public stays generic, private carries the specifics. The full flow is here, and it is the first automation most local accounts should build.
One automation, one week, then the second
- Pick the post that already attracts questions. An ordinary evergreen one, not the reel that did unusually well.
- Trigger on a small any-of keyword set taken from your tally. Matching ignores case and punctuation, so you do not need variants for capitals or question marks.
- Fill negative keywords before you fill anything else. This is the field that protects you.
- Test on myself. Read the public reply as a stranger would, then check every fact in the private one against reality.
- Go live on that one, and stop. Spend a week reading Activity: what went out, what was blocked and why, and what arrived matching nothing. That last group writes your next keyword list for you.
Two settings local accounts get wrong
Quiet hours, set against the wrong clock. The default is roughly overnight and most owners never look again. Check which timezone it is configured against, because a shop in Nagpur with quiet hours running on some other clock is silently holding its best hour of the day. The evening is usually when local decisions get made, so keep the evening open and switch off late night.
No rate budget. A reel travels differently from a photo. An uncapped automation firing at two thousand comments in an hour is how an ordinary good day starts looking like spam. The cap turns a spike into a queue, which is what you want.
Where the enquiries end up
Capture-to-Leads records who asked, what about, and when. There is no integration to anything; you export a CSV and work it like a callback list.
For a local business that is usually the right amount of machinery. Eleven people asked about the bridal package in March, with dates and handles, in a spreadsheet — nobody needs a pipeline for that, and pretending you do is how tools get abandoned.
What it will not do, plainly
It cannot book, hold, confirm or cancel anything, because it cannot see any diary. It cannot take a payment. It cannot check stock. It cannot message someone who has not messaged you first. It does not do WhatsApp, and it does not write your posts.
It runs on the official Instagram Graph API, so a comment stays answerable for seven days and a DM thread for twenty-four hours — and the DM window restarts only when the customer writes again, not when you do.
The free tier is 100 credits with no card and packs start at ₹499. A local account running the build above spends very little, because nearly all of it is templates. If you are wondering what the AI half is actually for, the honest answer for a small shop is a shorter post than you would expect.
