How to make sure your Instagram DMs are always open
Important Settings to monitor (and potentially change) on your IG account
Hey there gorgeous,
I hope you have had a great week.
If you read Letters to Quiet Creatives weekly you may remember a little while ago I wrote a post about how Instagram is rolling out a new default setting (please pop through and have a read if you haven’t already otherwise the following may not make much sense) which will make it harder to engage with people through their Stories and via DMs directly.
The feedback from that post was interesting. People who have been using Instagram for years were the most concerned because they know the power of an always open avenue of private communication like Direct Messages.
DMs are the place where we develop the closest relationships and strategic use of Stories is one of the best ways to funnel people into our DMs.
Without that intimate space of one to one discussion via DMs on Instagram it is much harder to engage in relationship building and the sales that come from this. To lose the functionality altogether would be quite devastating for many brands, and to lose it without knowing why or even when it happened would be more than a little frustrating.
So it is with a sense of relief that today I am sharing a simple workaround I’ve come across for making sure your DMs are always kept open.
Follow the instructions below to keep your DMs open and functioning for your business.
Go to your profile page
Tap the three horizontal lines at the top right hand side
Go to Messages and Story Replies
Check that your Message Controls show ‘Requests’ not ‘Don’t receive requests"‘
Check that your Story Replies allows Story Replies from everyone.
Change the preferences if applicable.
That’s it.
I’m also going to pop a reminder in my diary to once a month double check my settings have remained intact and not been changed back by Instagram (ie not reverted to the default of ‘Don’t allow Story replies’ and ‘Don’t receive message requests’ they would prefer).
It may sound like overkill, but the thing is that Instagram doesn’t want us to be able to sell our products without advertising. By restricting our ability to sell organically through closing DMs to anyone who has never DMd us before, they make it more likely that people will look to advertising to get the sales they once used to get for free.
Let me know, have they changed your default settings yet?
X Ilona