Reference for every option on an Instagram comment trigger. You do not set these in a form — you describe what you want and Octo configures it — but knowing what is available makes the description better, and this page is what to check when an automation matches more or less than you expected.
If you are setting one up for the first time, start with set up your first automation instead.
Which posts the automation watches
Three choices.
| Scope | What it watches | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| A specific post | Only comments under the post or posts you pick | A campaign tied to one piece of content |
| The next post you publish | Arms now, binds to the next post you put up | You are about to publish and want the automation waiting |
| All posts | Every post on the account, including future ones | An always-on keyword like PRICE or BOOK |
All posts is the default and usually right for an evergreen keyword. Next post exists because the alternative is publishing, then rushing to attach an automation while comments are already arriving.
If two of your automations could both claim the same comment, only one answers — see when two automations overlap below.
How keywords are matched
Four modes, from strictest to loosest. Whole word is the default and the right answer most of the time.
Before matching, the comment is normalised: lowercased, emoji removed, invisible characters stripped, punctuation treated as a space. That normalisation is why matching is more forgiving than it first appears.
| Mode | Matches | Does not match |
|---|---|---|
| Exact | The comment is only the keyword | PEPTIDE please |
| Whole word (default) | The keyword as a standalone word, anywhere | peptides |
| Contains | The keyword anywhere, including inside other words | — |
| Typo-tolerant | One character off | Two or more characters off |
What whole word actually catches
Against the keyword PEPTIDE, all of these match:
PEPTIDE Peptide! peptide please
PEPTIDE? ...PEPTIDE... @yourhandle PEPTIDE 🙏These do not:
peptides ← use Contains
peptied ← use Typo-tolerantThat covers how people really comment — with punctuation, emoji, a mention of your handle, or a please on the end — without firing on a plural.
When to reach for the other three
Exact is for when the keyword must be the entire comment and nothing else. Rarely what you want, because it fails on a trailing emoji.
Contains is for keyword families. PEPTIDE in contains mode catches
peptides and peptide-therapy. The cost is that it also catches any longer
word containing your keyword, so test it against a real comment thread first.
Typo-tolerant allows one character of difference — a transposed letter, a missing one. It is off by default and unavailable for keywords shorter than six characters, deliberately. On a four-letter keyword, one character of tolerance stops meaning “they misspelled it” and starts meaning “any four-letter word”, and the result is a DM to somebody who never asked. On a short keyword the option simply is not offered.
Excluding words
You can list words that prevent a match even when the keyword is present.
The common use is a keyword that also appears in complaints or questions you do
not want to auto-answer. BOOK with cancel excluded will not fire on “how do
I cancel my booking”.
Exclusions are checked after the keyword and always win.
Replying to every comment
Instead of keywords, an automation can fire on any comment on the posts it watches. Exclusions still apply, so this is really “everything except”.
Worth being careful with. Every comment includes “gorgeous 😍” and “first”, and a DM to those people is unwanted at best. It is most defensible on a post whose entire purpose is lead capture, where any comment genuinely does signal interest.
Replies to replies
By default, only top-level comments trigger an automation. Replies within a comment thread do not.
This default protects you from a specific failure: your automation’s own public reply is itself a comment. Fire on replies, and it can answer itself, which posts another reply, which triggers it again. The symptom is not silence — it is a burst of activity that looks like the automation working extremely well for about thirty seconds.
Turn it on when your audience genuinely converses in threads and you want to catch a keyword posted as a reply.
When two automations overlap
If two active automations could both claim one comment, exactly one answers. Ours resolves it by how narrowly targeted the automation is: an automation watching one specific post beats one watching all posts, because the more specific targeting is the more deliberate intent.
The practical consequence is the failure it produces. A forgotten automation on a single post can quietly outrank the new all-posts one you just built, and the symptom is a reply you did not write for this campaign. If a new automation seems not to work, check what was actually sent before assuming it never fired.
When you save an automation whose keywords overlap an existing active one, Octo tells you which one will win and why, so this is usually caught at authoring time rather than discovered in production.
What you cannot configure
Two things are fixed by Instagram, not by us, and no setting changes them:
- One public reply and one private DM per comment. Not a quota you can raise.
- The messaging window opens only when the person responds. A link button does not count.
Both are covered in the rules that actually bind.