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How to answer Instagram and Facebook Messenger DMs with your BotChap AI assistant

October 8, 20267 min read

For a lot of small businesses the first question never comes through a website. It arrives as an Instagram DM late in the evening, or a Messenger chat while you are busy with a client. By the time you reply, the person has often asked someone else. BotChap can now answer both. This guide covers what the assistant does inside Instagram and Messenger, how to connect it, what your customers see, and how it deals with spam and abuse so you do not have to.

Why DMs go unanswered

DMs feel informal, so they get treated as something to deal with later. The trouble is that the people sending them are often the warmest leads you have. They found you, they like what they saw, and they asked a direct question: how much, when are you free, do you do this. Every hour without an answer lowers the chance they book.

The questions are also repetitive. Prices, opening hours, where you are, whether you have a slot on Saturday. You have answered them hundreds of times. That is exactly the kind of work an assistant grounded in your own content does well.

What the assistant does in your DMs

When you connect a channel, the same assistant that runs your website chat starts answering there. It uses the same knowledge base, the same system prompt and the same rules. There is no second setup to keep in sync.

It answers from your content. Prices, services, policies and opening hours come from the documents and pages you uploaded to the knowledge base. If something is not in there, it says it does not know rather than guessing, and it never invents a price.

It takes bookings in the thread. If you have connected a calendar and switched on booking, a customer who wants an appointment is walked through the day, the time and their contact details right inside the conversation. The booking lands in your calendar like any other.

It reads photos. A customer can send a photo of a damaged item, a model plate or the style they want, and the assistant answers with the photo in view. Only a short text description is kept with the conversation, never the photo itself. There is more on this in our guide to photo questions.

It keeps replies short. DMs are read on phones, so replies on Instagram and Messenger are written to fit a chat bubble rather than a web page.

Before you start

You need four things:

A BotChap Growth or Scale plan. Messaging channels are not part of the Free or Starter plans.
A chatbot that uses the BotChap AI assistant with AI Credits. Replies on Instagram and Messenger are billed from your credits, the same way as your website chat.
A Facebook Page you manage.
For Instagram, an Instagram professional account (business or creator) linked to that Facebook Page. A personal Instagram account cannot be connected. You can switch an account to professional in the Instagram app settings for free.

It also helps to have your knowledge base in good shape first. A connected channel answers from whatever content is there, so fix the gaps before you open the door. Our guide to keeping a knowledge base grounded walks through that.

Connecting your accounts

The whole setup happens in the BotChap editor and takes a few minutes.

Open your chatbot in the editor and go to the Deploy tab. Under Messaging Channels, click Connect.
Click Connect with Facebook. A Facebook window opens. Log in, then choose the Facebook Page, and the Instagram account linked to it, that BotChap should be allowed to answer for.
Pick the accounts to use with this chatbot. Back in BotChap, every account you granted is listed. Click Use here next to the Page for Messenger and next to the Instagram account for DMs.
Send yourself a test message. From a different account, message your Page or your Instagram profile and check that the assistant replies with the answer you expect.

One Facebook login can grant several Pages and Instagram accounts. Each one is bound to a single chatbot, so if you run more than one business you can point each Page at its own assistant.

What your customers see

Nothing changes for them. They message you the way they always have, and they get a reply in the same thread, usually within a few seconds. There is no link to click and no app to install.

You keep full control of the inbox. Your Instagram and Messenger apps still show every conversation, and you can step in and reply yourself at any time. Every conversation is also saved in BotChap Analytics, marked with the channel it came from, so you can read what the assistant said. If you want to take a conversation over completely, open it in Analytics and click Mute bot. The assistant stays silent in that conversation until you unmute it.

Spam and abuse

Open inboxes attract two kinds of trouble: people who are only there to insult you, and floods of photos or videos. BotChap handles both without you lifting a finger.

Abusive messages get one calm reply. The assistant judges each message as it answers it, in any language. Insults, threats, harassment and sexual content get one short, neutral sentence saying it can only help with questions about your business. The message is flagged in your conversation history so you can see it.

A second one ends the conversation. If the same person sends another abusive message within 24 hours, the assistant stops replying in that conversation. Their messages are still saved, but no reply is generated, so you are not billed for them. You get a notification, and you can unmute the conversation from Analytics if you think it was a mistake.

Floods are muted too. Ten or more photos or videos with no text in between, within ten minutes, mutes the conversation in the same way.

Frustrated customers are not abusive. Someone who swears because their order arrived broken is a customer with a real problem, and the assistant helps them normally. The rule is written that way on purpose, because cutting off an angry customer is worse than answering a rude one.

On Instagram you can add a second layer: turn on Hidden Words in the Instagram app, under Settings and privacy, to filter offensive message requests before they reach you at all.

Limits worth knowing

It only replies to people who message you first. The assistant never starts conversations, sends promotions or messages lists of people. It answers the people who wrote to your business.

Videos, voice notes and files are not read. Photos are. Anything else gets one short note, at most once a day per conversation, saying the assistant could not open it. Reactions and stickers are simply ignored.

WhatsApp is supported too, as of October 2026. Connect your WhatsApp Business number from the editor on Growth or Scale and the assistant answers there as well, while you keep using the WhatsApp Business app. This guide covers Instagram and Messenger, but the limits above apply on WhatsApp the same way.

It is only as good as your content. A connected channel makes gaps in your knowledge base visible faster, because more people ask more questions. Read the first week of conversations in Analytics and fill in what was missing.

A sensible first week

Connect one channel first, usually the one where you get the most messages. Read every conversation for the first few days. Look for questions the assistant could not answer, answers that were technically right but unhelpful, and moments where a person should have stepped in. Fix the content, not the assistant: add the missing price, clarify the policy, upload the document that was missing. Once the answers look right, connect the second channel.