Two Instagram DM settings most people never turn on

I spend a lot of time helping small business and creators optimize their Instagram inboxes. It’s almost always the same few questions coming in over and over, and each one takes a few minutes to answer in between everything else.

Instagram has two features made for exactly this, and most accounts I look at haven’t set up either one.

1. FAQs (also called ice breakers)

These are up to four questions that show up when someone opens a chat with you for the first time, like “How much is a cut?” or “Do you ship to Europe?”. The person taps one instead of typing and gets the answer you wrote ahead of time.

You can set them up in the app, under the business or creator tools in your settings. To pick the four, scroll back through last month’s DMs and count. After ten minutes the top four are usually obvious.

They only show in the phone app and only in a new chat, so people who’ve already messaged you won’t see them.

2. a persistent menu

This is a small menu that stays available for the whole conversation. Someone can jump to “Book”, “Prices” or “Order status” at any point without having to ask.

You can’t set this one up in the app. It only works through Instagram’s messaging API, so you need a DM tool that connects to it.

Where a tool actually changes things

The FAQs you set in the app send one fixed reply and stop there. Set up through a tool with API access, a tap can start a whole flow: the answer, a follow-up question, then the right link. On the accounts I'm helping, people who tap an ice breaker set up this way click the link they get about 57% of the time. If you only need a fixed answer, the in-app version is fine.

Two small habits that help either way

• Put the link in your second message, not your first. A first message that’s only a link reads like spam.
• Keep your first reply short enough to read in a lock screen preview.

Hope you find this useful! :)

and curious to know what’s the one question you get in DMs more than any other?