What {{brand.name}} is and what it does

What {{brand.name}} is and what it does · Help

If your day is spent chasing Instagram DMs, post comments and WhatsApp messages one by one, every message you miss is a lost sale. {{brand.name}} gathers all of them on one screen and answers the repetitive questions even while you sleep. This article explains what the panel solves and which parts it is made of.

The problem it solves

In a small business, message traffic arrives from three places: the Instagram DM inbox, the comments under your posts, and WhatsApp. Each lives in its own app, each sends its own notifications, and none of them answers the question "what did we discuss with this person last time?" If the inbox is on your phone, nobody on your team can help; if several people are looking at it, the same customer gets two different answers.

{{brand.name}} brings that mess together in three ways:

One inbox — Instagram and WhatsApp conversations appear in the same list, with the same filters.
Automatic replies — "How much is it", "When will it ship", "Do you have a size chart" are answered in seconds.
Working together — your teammates see the same conversations, chats get assigned to people, and it is clear who answered what.

💡 The panel is more than a chatbot box: behind every message a contact record builds up. Who asked what, which tag they carry, which campaign they came from — all of it stays.

The parts of the panel

Every heading in the left menu takes on one job. Some may not appear, depending on your account's channel type, your plan and your role.

Inbox

The list of all conversations. It narrows with the Open, Mine, Unassigned, Unread, Closed and All filters; the connection filter shows only Instagram or only WhatsApp. Open a conversation to reply by hand, assign it to a teammate, or close it.

Automations

Flows that start with a trigger and run their steps in order. Rules like "when a comment with 'price' arrives on a post, send a private message" or "when someone replies to a story, send the catalog link" live here. You build flows on a drag-and-drop canvas, and they start running once you press Publish. For the detail, read the article on how the system works end to end.

Contacts

Everyone who writes to you automatically becomes a contact record. Name, username, tags, custom fields and past conversations are kept here. Automations write tags and fill fields on this record, and later flows branch on that information.

My profile, Posts and Insights

If you connected an Instagram account, you can see your post grid inside the panel, prepare a new post and schedule it, and follow reach and engagement numbers. These sections appear only for Instagram accounts; a WhatsApp account has no equivalent.

Reports

The panel's own numbers: how many messages arrived, how many runs started, how many conversations each agent handled. The difference from Insights is this: Insights shows Meta's measurements (reach, views, demographics), Reports shows your traffic inside the panel.

Settings

There are three separate settings areas, and mixing them up is easy:

Settings (left menu) — the settings of the single account that is open: connection, business hours, messaging behaviour, saved replies.
Portfolio settings — the gear icon in the account switcher: team, assignment rules, account list, usage.
My user settings — what belongs only to you: profile, security, preferences, plan and invoices.

Portfolio and account: two different things

These are the two most confused concepts in the panel, and they are worth learning on day one.

An account is a single Instagram account or a single WhatsApp number you connected. The inbox, automations, contacts and reports always live inside one account.

A portfolio is the container that groups accounts, and the team belongs to the portfolio. Someone you invite to a portfolio works with the same role across the accounts that portfolio can reach. If you run two separate brands, you put them in two portfolios and keep the teams apart.

⚠️ Note: An empty account is never created. An account comes into being the moment an Instagram account or a WhatsApp number is connected. A portfolio, on the other hand, can be created empty.

Team roles are defined on the portfolio too. There are five: Owner manages everything, Admin manages settings and the team, Editor builds flows and replies, Agent works only in the inbox, Viewer cannot change anything. Which accounts a person can reach is a separate setting from their role; an account they cannot reach never appears on their screen.

An example: a small jewellery shop

The easiest way to see what the panel does is a concrete case. Picture a shop selling jewellery through Instagram. Every new post collects dozens of "how much?" comments, the DM inbox overflows, and after 8 in the evening nobody is watching.

After setup, the day goes like this:

A comment saying "How much is it?" lands under a new post.
The post comment trigger fires and a private message goes to whoever wrote it: the price list and a View catalog button.
The same flow writes the tag asked about price onto that person; the contact record builds up with that fact.
If the customer follows with "when will it ship", the keyword trigger takes over and sends the delivery time.
If the question matches no flow, the conversation waits in the inbox as Unassigned and someone on the team answers by hand.
After 8pm business hours take over; the customer gets a single "we'll be back at 9am" message and the conversation waits until morning.

At the end of that day the shop owner sees in Reports how many messages were answered automatically, and in Contacts how many new leads piled up. What was built is not a robot but a filtered inbox: repetitive questions answer themselves, and a human only looks at the conversations that genuinely need one.

Which channels it works with

There are two channels today: Instagram and WhatsApp. Which ones are open depends on platform settings; a channel that is off never shows up on the connect screen.

On the Instagram side there are two connection paths. Connect with Instagram works directly with an Instagram business or creator account and needs no Facebook Page. Connect with Facebook adds the account through the Facebook Page it is linked to, and lets you pick several accounts at once. Because the two run on separate Meta apps, their permission approvals are separate too.

On the WhatsApp side you choose your business account and number in Meta's setup window. Once the number is connected, the panel reads its quality rating, daily new-conversation tier and display name approval status.

Who uses it, and what not to expect

The panel is for anyone who does business by message: shops selling through Instagram, beauty and health businesses working by appointment, restaurants and cafés, course and training providers, real estate and travel offices. No coding is needed — flows are built by connecting boxes.

What not to expect should be said just as plainly:

A personal Instagram account cannot be connected; the account has to be a business or creator account.
The panel does as much as Meta allows. You cannot message someone whenever you like: you can write freely within 24 hours of their last message, and after that only an approved template goes out. This is a restriction on Meta's side and applies to every tool that uses their API.
You cannot send a bulk promotion to everyone who comments; the private message a comment earns is once per comment, and it must be used within 7 days of that comment.

These limits are not arbitrary — they keep your account from being shut down. The panel will not attempt a send that breaks the rule, and it tells you why.

Now that you know the parts, the next step is to see the road a message travels from arriving in the panel to leaving as a reply. After that you can run the full setup from start to finish.