Subject: Follow to DM fires, but at a 0.6% rate — what trigger rates are others seeing?
Hi all,
This is not another "it doesn't trigger at all" post. Mine does trigger — just almost never — and I'd like to understand whether that's normal.
Some background: I set the automation up a few months ago and it barely produced anything. I worked through everything the "Get help" chat suggested, none of it changed the outcome, and eventually I parked it. Coming back to it now with actual numbers.
Numbers over the last 3 months:
- 6 total triggers
- ~1,000 new followers in the last month alone
- Roughly a 0.6% trigger rate
Setup:
- Instagram Business account, 15k+ followers, region: Spain (EU)
- Connected via the Unified Instagram Onboarding flow
- "Say hi to new followers" LIVE the whole period, delay set to [X] minutes
- Comment-to-DM and story reply automations on the same account work normally
What I've already tried, over several months:
- Created and linked a Facebook Business Page to the account
- Switched the Instagram account to Professional mode
- Tried both account types — Creator and Business — to see if eligibility differed
- Reconnected Meta and re-authorised permissions countless times, including full disconnect and reconnect
- Reconnected specifically through the Unified Instagram Onboarding flow
- Cleared cache and cookies, logged out and back in, re-published the automation
- Worked through the entire "Get help" (has been removed and the new AI chat has been of no use) chat troubleshooting path more than once
None of it changed the trigger rate in any measurable way.
Since it has fired 6 times, I'm assuming the account is genuinely in the beta and the follow trigger permission is enabled — so please don't send me the eligibility checklist. The connection is fine and the automation is live.
What I'd like to know:
- What trigger rate are other accounts seeing, as a percentage of new followers? I have no benchmark at all. Is 0.6% catastrophic or roughly what everyone gets?
- How much of this is Meta's 1-message-per-user-per-week global cap?
- Are there minimum requirements I'm not aware of — plan tier, contact limits, anything else? I want to rule out that this is a plan-side ceiling rather than a Meta-side one.
- Is there any way to see the automation's internals? I can't inspect the flow to work out where it's failing, so I'm debugging blind.
I'm trying to work out whether this is worth keeping as part of the strategy or whether I should build the welcome flow entirely on comment-to-DM and icebreakers. Real numbers from anyone running this at similar scale would help enormously.
Thanks.
