How to prevent automation from triggering when the page admin sends a manual DM?

in the settings → inbox behaviour, there should be a section where you can pause automation for a certain amount of time.  have you set this up? 

2.  For the keywords, did you use message is “x” ?  this tells the bot that the subscriber needs to type that one specific keyword

On #1: there's no native way, and it's not a setting you're missing. When a DM is sent from the Instagram app itself, Meta delivers it as an echo and doesn't tell any tool whether the admin or the contact sent it. The keyword logic just sees the text and fires.

Two things that actually work:

Have your medical team send the manual follow-ups from inside the Live Chat inbox instead of the native IG app. Sent that way it's an outbound agent message and won't trip your own keyword triggers. Pair it with the "Pause automations during conversations" setting Jocelin pointed to.

For scale, gate your triggers with a custom field. When a human opens a follow-up, set something like human_handling = true and add a condition on each keyword trigger so it only fires when that field is off, then reset it when the conversation closes. More reliable than leaning on timers.

As a developer and consultant on big players of industry of Contact Center I feel sorry that users don’t have this so basic logic, I have been using ManyChat for its price and simplicity but also suffering from this, and it is something the tool should have considered a long time ago and don’t expect users to follow a manual procedure when the idea they sell is automation. Kinda ridicolous.

Hi ​@renacerfinancieroya,  Great questions — this is a common pain point when teams mix manual outreach with automation. I recommend not to do it - please see my comments regarding your questions:

Q1. Does ManyChat have a native way to detect that a message was sent by the admin and suppress automation?

Unfortunately, no. That said, two things will help:

• Disable the Default Reply (Settings → Instagram → leave the Default Reply flow empty). This prevents the bot from firing when it doesn't recognize a message.
• Audit your active keywords and make them more specific — if your team is manually typing words that accidentally match a keyword, those flows will still trigger.

Q2. Is there a setting or workaround to prevent keywords from triggering when the business side initiates or continues a conversation?

The most reliable native option is to manually pause automation for that contact directly in the ManyChat inbox before your team takes over the conversation. This tells the bot to stand down while a human handles it.

Q3. Would using "Pause Automation" via API or Zapier be a viable scalable solution?

We'd recommend sticking with ManyChat's native tools for this — use the manual pause automation feature directly in the inbox. It keeps things simpler and avoids adding complexity with external integrations.

Hope this helps!

Catalina Rendon