108. Automate Your Instagram Welcome Message & Grow Faster in 2026

Speaker A: Welcome to the Go Get Great podcast, the perfect spot for aspiring entrepreneurs and ambitious small business owners. I'm Brittany, your host, an online marketing strategist and mom of five. Here you'll discover how to start or scale your small business with practical marketing and business strategies that even the busiest entrepreneurs can implement. But we don't just stop at business Insight because we know that what you do when you're not wearing your entrepreneur hat is just as important to the success of your business. As a fellow mom, I understand the importance of having a space for real talk where we share the relatable, messy moments of balancing motherhood and a business. So let's dive in and start your journey from good to great. Manychat released a new feature, and I gotta say, guys, I'm so excited for it. I have been waiting for this for so long, and actually, at this point, some of you may or may not have known about it, have seen it in action already on Instagram, because it actually came out a little while ago. Um, um, I tried to record this episode in December without actually testing the new feature, made some incorrect assumptions, and then when I actually used it, realized I had to scrap the episode and hadn't had a chance to rerecord it until today. So here we go. We're going to make this short and sweet because I have talked about ManyChat before, so we're going to gloss over absolutely everything about what that is. If you're, like, you're saying words I've never heard of, um, the very brief definition of it is that Manychat is an automated DM messenger, so basically means that it will send DMs on your behalf automatically to people. I have other podcast episodes, which I will link in the description below. I highly recommend that you start there, um, to learn more about what ManyChat is and whether or not it would be applicable to you as a business owner, as an influencer. However, you're coming to listen to this podcast. Uh, so I've used manychat in my business for a couple years now, sometimes more heavily than others. I've got lots of different things set up. I absolutely love the platform, think it's fantastic, and I have been waiting and waiting for them to do this, and they did it, and I'm happy that it's here. It's not what I was expecting, which is how I made some incorrect assumptions in my original episode. Um, but it's still a great feature, and if you don't have it in place, but you have manychat already, then this is definitely one that you're going to want to add. So basically the premise of this feature is that anytime you get a new follower, you can automatically send a message to people. Whoa, Hallelujah. Uh, and basically what that is going to do is going to help you more quickly move people through your sales funnel. So I'm going to talk about this primarily from a business perspective, but it does work for influencers as well. Because technically influencers are business owners. It's just that their business product may vary depending on what specifically they're promoting at any given time. Um, and a lot of influencers do collabs, partnerships, et cetera. I can speak from experience in this because these are also things that I do. Um, you know, I don't have an Amazon storefront, but I am Amazon affiliate, so you. I'll randomly share Amazon links in my content. Um, excuse me. Uh, so, I mean, it's a different thing, but it is and can still be ran like a business. So you can still use those features even if you don't have, you know, like a traditional brick and mortar business business. It will work for you too, and I highly recommend you do use it. It's actually fabulous for influencers. Um, from a business perspective, this feature, like I said, is gonna help you move people through your sales funnel more quickly. Usually what happens is you get a follower, you hope that they engage with some content and continue seeing your stuff. And you know, in two months, three months, six months, they're like, hey, I'm ready to work with you. Problem with that being is that in the interim, Instagram may have stopped showing your content to them. Uh, cause basically, from what I can kind of see from using the algorithm myself, is that if you glance over one or two posts, meaning no likes, no comments, you don't stop and watch the whole video, et cetera, et ceter. Etc, Instagram thinks, oh, they don't like this anymore, so we're not going to show it to them. How frustrating is that from a business perspective? Because there are times, especially if you have a broader business like mine, where I may talk about podcasting for a couple episodes, uh, or a couple pieces of content, but the person who's following me is really looking for email marketing support. So they may not engage with the podcast stuff and then all of a sudden they stop seeing my stuff, even though I start talking about email marketing again. Bananas, bananas that they do that, but they do. Which, uh, is why you want to very quickly move them through your funnel as fast as possible. When they're most interested in you. So you're going to use this new feature to do that and you're hopefully going to skip the algorithm process completely and try and get them on your email list, because that is the gold mine. That is the goal. When they're on your email list, you have finite permission to communicate with them, um, as much or as little as you want. And then it's up to them to decide, hey, I'm going to unsubscribe. I no longer want to receive this content. It's not up to somebody else to determine that for them. It's up to them. And you tend to convert people better via email so you make more money. So the goal from m a strategic level is always to try and get people from social media to an email list. And yes, technically influencers should have an email list too, but most of them don't seem to side tangent. And I mean, I kind of get it. I don't have an email list for my. Not anymore. I used to, um, I don't have an email list for my influencer thing. But that's something that I have been kind of debating about whether or not I want to do because there are lots of times where I want to be like, yo, I want to send you these blog links. And I mean, I can put it up in the story, but it disappears after 24 hours. So, you know, m frustrating. Anyway, how the new feature works is you can set it up similar to how you would build another automation. So if you have never built an automation in manychat again, highly recommend you revisit some of my other episodes where I talk about this in more detail. Um, or get on the wait list for my course, which may or may not exist in physical form yet, but I am working on building a ManyChat course. And by saying that, I mean, I'm waiting on Grayson to finish editing the videos that I gave him four months ago. Renovation life, guys. Um, but it is coming and it will hopefully be out soon. And if you are interested in it, send me a message and I will make sure that I put your name on a list to let you specifically know when it comes out. Because that's exactly what I'm going to be teaching you is the best way to get people from social media to an email list automatically via ah, DMS in a way that still feels like you and not like you're being sold to by a robot. So specialized skill set there. Um, so you're gonna set it up kind of similar to that. So you're gonna go in, set up a trigger. Trigger is gonna be somebody new follows me. And then you can prep up to two messages. So the first one, uh, is kind of like an introductory message and you have to request permission to continue messaging them for it to work effectively. So, meaning there needs to be a button somewhere in the first message that they have to click in order for them to receive the second message. And if they never click the button in the first message, the automation will not proceed to the second message. So highly recommend you frame it. Hey, thanks so much for the follow. This is kind of what you see here. Ask a question. That's usually what I do. Are you interested in blah, blah, blah? For my business, I'm pretty sure I say, do you like free stuff? People click, yeah, of course. I love free stuff. Which I'm pretty sure is what I made the button say. And then they get up the second message saying, okay, awesome. Uh, me too. I have some free stuff that I'd love for you to download. Are you looking for? And then you have up to three options because you can only ever have three buttons in a manychat message. Love for there to be four, but we're rolling with three. Pretty sure it's like social media, email help, podcasting support, and then it links them to my freebie pages. Um, because unfortunately, with this new feature, you are limited to sending those two messages. So you can't build out a flow where they give your name and email address directly in Instagram chats, like I do with my typical other automations. And again, explain all that in my course, I talk about it a little bit in some of my other podcast episodes and blog posts about that. Um, um, so you can look for more details there. So basically what you're going to do is you're going to send your introductory message, get them to click that button to then have them receive the second message. And the second message is where you can play around with this a little bit more. Uh, uh, like I said, for my business, it's more like, okay, cool, here's some freebie options. Choose what works best for you. Um, and then also, like those chats end up in Instagram and at a place when I have more time and more active on Instagram, I would go in and continue the conversation depending on what people click on. You can't always tell. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. Yes. So that's what I do in my business. And then you could go back and continue the conversation. Hey, you know, did you get a chance to download any of these freebies. You know, if you have any questions, let me know sort of thing, you can continue it as a human. You have the option to go in at any time when someone is messaging you in your Instagram DMs and you can send them a message that's not part of the automation. Totally cool. Go ahead and do that. But for me, I'm not always online. I'm a busy mom. I'm renovating. I've been on maternity leave most of the last few months, and I wasn't active on the platform, so I didn't want someone being like, hey, I really want this freebie. And then wait four months for me to realize that they sent me a message and send it to them. So that was part of the reason why I set all this stuff up in the first place three pregnancies ago. Most people don't have that many babies. Guys don't judge, um, from an influencer's perspective, similar concept. Hey, thanks so much for the follow. So excited that you're here. You know, would you like some more information about me kind of thing? And then they click the button and then I send them another one. It's like, okay, cool, here's a little bit more information. And then in that one, again, because it's not heavily business focused for me, I just linked to a couple blog posts that I think would be a great place for them to start. And I should actually go back and update some of those links because I think I posted newer content that would be more relevant. But I, uh, think one of them's, you know, about my motherhood journey. Another one's about the home renovations and some things like that. Eventually, I want to create some blog posts that are like my top five kitchen gadgets as someone who cooks for a family of seven. But again, busy mom life hasn't had time to work on some of that stuff. But that's kind of the goal. So then people would go do a blog post or a podcast episode, learn more about us, hopefully get on an email list or at least be more engaged to want to see your content going forward. So again, depending on whether you're coming at this from an influencer perspective or whether you're coming at this from a business perspective, and also, like, what your goals are at any given point in time, would determine what kind of links you would use in this. But that is the premise of the new feature that Manychat added. And I can say with 100% certainty that it does Work really well because I happen to be running some paid ads at the time to promote one of my posts that was doing phenomenal organically on my personal page. Um, and I had set the feature up and I could see it getting tested and like, people actually used it like very regularly. Like, I would say I'd have to go back in and check manychat, and I don't have time to pop in and do this at this exact moment. Um, but it'll tell you what percent of people actually use the automation. And my guess is that we're somewhere between 75 and 85%, because it seemed pretty high from the conversations that I did peek at. Um, that being said, there were some times where people would type a reply to the message instead of actually clicking on the button. And then that doesn't work. Uh, so you either have to go in and be like, oh, hey, you've got to click the button, or you have to like manually type the next message to them and include the links, et cetera. Uh, so there are small caveats to that, but for the most part it is fantastic. Especially if you're a creator that has a large volume of new followers or a business owner that gets lots of new people. If you have like, frequently asked questions that you get asked a lot, you could build those into it. So there's so many different ways that you can use it. Again, depends on who you are, what you do, what your goals are. But I really just wanted to put it out there because if you haven't used manychat before, then you may not even know that this is an option. Or if you have used it but haven't been in to see it regularly. Because truthfully, I unsubscribe from a lot of their messages because there's just a lot of them. Uh, you may not know that this feature is added and you may not have set it up, but I highly recommend that you do. It is great. Doesn't take very long to set up because again, you are limited to those two messages and those technically four buttons. But really one of them basically just makes them click the other one. So three linking options. There's not a whole heck of a lot of stuff you can do with it. It doesn't take too long to set up. Super easy to do, but. But super high roi. Um, because this was actually something that I was again gonna create a blog post about or talk about on social media. But I feel like one of the most underutilized things is actually just welcoming new followers. There are so many times where I'll follow a new creator and I may have questions or I want to get to know them better, but, like, you don't really know them. So it feels weird to just outright message and be like, yo, how old's your kid? Which is questions that I've wondered what regularly when following new influencers, especially if I'm looking for, like, activities for my kids or board game recommendations. Because you may see something and it might look cool, but it's kind of hard to judge sometimes the age of the kids. But it also seems super creepy for your first message to be to someone you don't know, how old's your kid? So then I don't. And then I don't end up buying the thing that they were talking about because I didn't want to be weird. So then they've also lost it on the commission of that too. So there's just so many, so many reasons that you should do this. But that's definitely one of the most underutilized features for sure. Just welcoming new followers. And I used to do this manually, Legitimately used to do this manually. All my business account didn't take as long. I would go in one or two times a week and I had like a preset message that I copied and pasted from my notes and I would send it to people and so many times, especially if I did it on my influencer account, because I used to too, when I was more actively promoting, um, health and fitness products. Don't really do that a whole heck of a lot anymore. Not that I don't use them. I just don't talk about it because ain't nobody got time for that. Ah, when you're renovating a house, um, and I used to send the messages out more consistently and so many people would be like, wow, thank you so much. You know, I follow so many people on Instagram and no one has ever personally messaged me to, like, say hi. Social media was meant for conversations, guys. Why are we not having the conversations? So please do. Even if you don't have manychat because you don't want to make the investment. Totally cool. Totally get that. Do the same thing I did. Type out a message, ask ChatGPT to write it for you. I don't care. Put it in your notes once or twice a week. Set a reminder on your phone to go in and do that. Please, please, please, please. Because you will get fantastic responses from it. And I think that it's one of the best ways to kind of have a really positive first impression with new people, especially as a business owner or as an influe. Um, also, if you think this is fabulous and you're like, Brittany has fabulous ideas, I want to know more about Britney. Thanks, I appreciate that. Um, also, I do. And I have. Um, and again, I'm going to sell something here. Be very transparent about this. You do not have to have this. I do think that it's a great option. Um, and it's called My Organic Engagement Playbook, which is basically business jargon for saying, I'm going to teach you how to have really natural, organic conversations with your followers without eating up your entire life. So there's a whole bunch of different things that you can do to help make sure that you have an active, engaged, and super excited to see your content group of people following you. And I usually can do it in about 10 to 15 minutes a day. I haven't been doing it recently. Honestly, Motherhood with five has been a little chaotic, but when I did it more consistently, I did see very consistent results from it. And I used to sometimes get clients from my social media content. Again, I haven't been posting on social media about my business very much lately or doing this engagement, but when I do, it does work and the people who have downloaded it and used it have really great things to say about it too. So I will link it in the show notes. Again, totally optional. You don't have to. Would love if you did. Does support me as a creator. Um, but it is a great resource and it is very kind of tied to the message today. So I would be kicking myself in the bum if I didn't say it. So putting that out there. Definitely go and check it out. Check out my other manychat things if you're interested. Definitely send me a message to get on the wait list. I'll see if I have time to just create a wait list and link it in the show notes before I post this episode. Um, because I am hoping that it will be out at least in the spring of 2026 because it was supposed to be out in the winter of 2025 and then we got busy with renovations. Um, yeah. Cool. I think that's all I have to say. It's really weird to do short episodes considering the fact that I just recorded a couple other really long ones. But that's the premise of it. Go check it out and make sure you come back for next week on the Go Get Great podcast. I'll probably be back with some more real life content. Uh, but I do have a whole bunch of other business topics that we're going to be talking about. I think one of the next ones we're going to dive into is email marketing, because it's been a hot minute since we talked about that, guys. And I should probably do a podcasting episode while I'm thinking about it too. So if you have questions about podcasting, can you send me a dm? So I have a topic for this episode that I should be writing on, the thing that I do now more consistently than I have been. Okay, thank you guys so much for listening. I will see you next week on the Go Get Great Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of Go Get Great. I hope that you found some inspiration and practical tips to help you take your life and business from good to great. If you enjoyed today's episode, please make sure to leave a review and subscribe so you never miss an episode. We've got so much more valuable content and amazing guests coming your way. And don't forget to follow us on social media for marketing tips and a whole lot of relatable mom content. You can find us on Instagram, BrittanyMiller socials and BrittanyNMiller. Uh, and if you're ready to elevate your marketing game, I would love to work with you. Whether you need help with social media strategy, email marketing, or growing a podcast of your own, Brittany Miller Socials is here to support you every step of the way. Visit my website at www.BrittanyMillerSoCials.ca to learn more about how we can work together. Thanks again for listening. Until next time. Keep going, keep growing and Go Get Great.

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