Instagram keyword triggers and auto-reply
Updated: September 2026
A keyword trigger is the small decision that decides whether the rest of your automation works. Match too tightly and you miss the person who typed guide please; match too loosely and you auto-reply to someone arguing in your comments. ReelDrop gives you three match modes, rotating replies, and a per-post cap. ReelDrop's free plan includes 5 active DM automations — comment triggers on reels — plus a full Instagram Reels scheduler, and it never asks for a credit card.
Three ways to match
Contains fires when the keyword appears anywhere in the message. This is the default for a reason: real comments are send me the guide!! and GUIDE pls, not the bare word.
Exact fires only when the message is the keyword by itself. Use it when the word is common enough to show up in ordinary conversation.
Any skips keyword matching and replies to everything on that post. Right for a giveaway, wrong for anything that attracts argument. Matching is case-insensitive in every mode, so GUIDE and guide are the same word.
Three places a keyword can fire
The same keyword logic runs on comments, incoming DMs, and story replies. A DM trigger turns a keyword into a self-serve FAQ: someone messages PRICE and gets your rate card without waiting for you to wake up.
You can scope a comment trigger to one post, to a post you have not published yet, or to everything. A per-post reply limit caps how many public replies go out, which is the guard rail for the day a Reel does ten times its usual numbers.
Replies that are not identical
Write several variants of the public reply and the DM, or start from the presets and the pre-generated bank. Each person gets one variant, chosen the same way every time for that person, so the same commenter never sees the wording change mid-conversation.
This is partly about not looking like a bot and partly about not sending a thousand byte-identical messages through a messaging API in an hour.
How ManyChat prices this
Keyword triggers are the part both tools are built around, and the pricing shapes differ. ManyChat charges by Active Contacts, the people who trigger you: 25 a month free since 2 March 2026, 250 on Essential at $14 a month, 2,500 on Pro at $29 a month. Its free plan also caps you at 4 live automations and puts ManyChat branding on the first message.
ReelDrop's free plan allows 5 active automations with the comment trigger and no contact cap. The DM-keyword and story-reply triggers are on the Influencer plan at $9.99 a month, which makes automations unlimited. The honest trade: ManyChat's flow builder handles branching conversations and ReelDrop's does not, while ReelDrop attaches the keyword to the post at scheduling time and ManyChat has no post publishing at all.
The full side-by-side, including where ManyChat is the better buy:
How ManyChat prices keyword triggersPRICE as a keyword in the DM inbox
A wedding photographer set a DM trigger on PRICE and PRICING that sends her packages PDF. Pricing was most of her inbox and none of her interesting conversations. Now the pricing questions answer themselves and she reads what is left.
One post, one word, capped
A meal-prep account ran a giveaway with match set to any and a per-post reply limit of 500. The post drew more comments than that. Public replies stopped at the cap, DMs kept going, and the comment section did not turn into a wall of the same sentence.
One keyword that had to be exact
A travel creator tried LINK as her keyword and discovered that half her comment section says the word link in ordinary conversation: nice link, is the link broken, link in bio? On contains match the automation answered all of it. Switching that automation to exact match fixed it in one click, and she moved her lead magnets to words nobody types by accident. That is the whole lesson of match modes: contains for a made-up word, exact for a real one.
Frequently asked questions
Is keyword matching case-sensitive?
No. GUIDE, Guide, and guide all match.
Can one automation watch several keywords?
Yes. Add as many as you want to a single automation, and any of them triggers it.
What stops it replying to every mention of a common word?
Exact match, mostly. If your keyword is a word people use in normal conversation, exact match means the automation only fires when the comment is that word on its own.
Can I auto-reply to DMs, not just comments?
Yes. Choose the DM trigger and the same keyword rules apply to incoming messages.
Do the automated replies all read the same?
Only if you write one variant. Write a few and ReelDrop rotates them, deterministically per person, so a conversation stays consistent while the comment thread does not repeat itself.
Which triggers are on the free plan?
The comment trigger, on up to 5 active automations, with no cap on how many people it answers. The DM-keyword and story-reply triggers are on Influencer at $9.99 a month, which also makes automations unlimited.
What happens if two automations match the same comment?
Scope your automations so they do not overlap: point one at a specific post and the broad one at everything else. A comment event is logged once per automation, so the cleanest setup is one keyword per job rather than several automations watching the same word.
Can I run a keyword on posts I have already published?
Yes. Point the automation at any recent post from the media picker, then use retrigger to replay comments that already happened, up to 50 comments per post across five posts. Retrigger is on the Influencer and Creator plans.
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