Comment and DM automation without getting your account restricted
Automated replies can answer price and stock questions in seconds. Set up carelessly, they look like spam to customers and to the platform. Narrow triggers, honest messages, and firm limits keep them useful.
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Most of the messages a business receives are the same handful of questions. How much is it? Is it in stock? Do you ship to my city? Answering them by hand is slow, and a customer left waiting for a price may buy somewhere else. Automation can answer those questions in seconds.
It can also go wrong in public. A rule that fires on every comment, sends the same DM to one person three times, or pitches a product at 3am reads as spam to the people receiving it, and platforms restrict accounts whose automated replies arrive too fast or too often.
Start with the questions you actually get
Before building anything, read the last two weeks of comments and messages and note which questions keep coming back with the same answer every time. Those are your first rules. Everything else stays with a person.
A typical first set for a shop looks like this:
- price questions on product posts
- comments asking for the link, or where to buy
- questions about opening hours and location
How a rule is put together
Every automation in eksis has three parts.
The trigger is what starts it: a new comment, a comment containing a keyword, a direct message, a DM containing a keyword, or a reply to your story.
Conditions narrow it down, usually to messages that contain certain words and do not contain others.
Actions are what happens next. A rule can reply to the comment publicly, answer the commenter privately by DM, send a follow-up message, like or hide the comment, tag the contact, or assign the conversation to a teammate.
Rules are set per account, and each one only offers what that platform allows. DM triggers and private replies work on Instagram and Facebook, which open messaging to business tools. On YouTube, Threads, and Bluesky, rules work on comments. On X, automated replies, likes, and hides stay off, because X charges for every API request and a rule runs unattended. Answer X replies from the inbox instead.
Use keywords narrow enough to be right
A rule that triggers on every comment ends up answering "love this!" with a price list. Match the words people use when they are actually asking, such as "price", "how much", and "cost", and include the misspellings and other languages your customers write in.
Add exclusions as well. A comment that contains "price" and "too high" is a complaint, not a question, and it deserves a person.
Write the message the way a person would
An automated reply is still your business talking. Keep the public reply short and point to the DM ("Sent you the details in a message"), then make the DM itself useful: the actual price, the actual link, and a way to reach a human if they need one.
Say that the message is automatic when that would matter to the person reading it. An answer that is honest about being automatic avoids the awkward moment when someone asks a follow-up and nobody is there to reply.
On Instagram and Facebook, follow-up messages only go out while the platform's 24-hour messaging window is open, so put everything important in the first message.
Set limits before you turn it on
Limits are what stop a helpful rule from looking like a spam bot. Each rule in eksis has three:
- A cap per person, such as one direct message per person per day, so nobody receives the same DM twice in one day.
- A ceiling on actions per hour, so a post that suddenly gets hundreds of comments does not set off hundreds of replies within minutes.
- Quiet hours, so nothing goes out while you are asleep and unable to follow up.
Start with conservative numbers. You can raise them once you have seen how the rule behaves.
Test it, then read the log
Before a rule goes live, open Test the automation. Type a sample comment and you will see which conditions matched and what would have been sent, without anything actually being sent. Try a real question, a compliment, and a complaint, and check that only the question triggers the rule.
Once the rule is live, the run log records what triggered each run, what it matched, what it sent, and how the platform responded. When a rule misfires, you can see the exact message that set it off instead of guessing.
Start from a template
You do not have to build from scratch. The template gallery covers the common cases, including price questions answered by DM, link requests, hiding spam comments, thanking people who reply to your story, and welcoming someone who messages you for the first time. Each template opens as an editable rule, not a locked preset.
You can also describe what you want to the AI Assistant in the automation builder. It sets up the rule, and you review it before anything turns on.
The Free plan includes one active automation, enough to handle your most common question. Every paid plan removes that cap. See how automation works in eksis or compare plans on the pricing page.
