Trigger
A trigger is the event that starts an automation. There are ten types, from a keyword to a post comment, an ad link or a given date.
Last updated: September 30, 2026
A trigger is the event that starts an automation. There are ten types, from a keyword to a post comment, an ad link or a given date.
Last updated: September 30, 2026
A trigger is the event that starts an automation. When someone writes "price", leaves a comment on your post, replies to your story or clicks your ad, it is the trigger that sets the flow in motion. An automation without a trigger never runs.
💡 Triggers live inside the flow's Start step; on the canvas it is the box labelled When…. A flow can hold up to 20 triggers, and all of them start the same flow.
A trigger states three things at once:
A trigger is a filter, not a step: it sends nothing itself. The first step of the flow sends the message.
ig.me / m.me short link or a QR code. If you give a link label (ref), only that campaign matches.⚠️ With the Mention trigger, Meta does not provide the identity of the person who tagged you; only the post and comment IDs arrive. The flow therefore runs against the account rather than a person: no private DM can be sent and the reply is written under the comment. This is a restriction on Meta's side.
Some triggers are explicit: even if the person has a session in progress, they interrupt it and start the new flow. The explicit triggers are: keyword, post comment, mention, story reply, story mention, post share, and link/ad.
The reasoning: if the person is arriving from somewhere new (they tapped a new comment, a new ad), it is right for them to enter the new flow rather than stay in the middle of the old conversation.
There are two exceptions:
Any message and Default reply are not explicit triggers; they run only when the person has no open session.
The keyword, post comment and story reply triggers each offer a Match setting:
Matching always ignores case and accents: "ŞİFRE", "sifre" and "şifre" all count as the same. You therefore never need to add a word again in its different spellings.
Post comments additionally offer excluded words: if one of them appears in the comment, the flow does not start at all. Exclusion is always searched with "contains".
More than one automation's trigger can match the same event. In that case the narrower one wins. Narrowing is scored like this:
So a "every comment on this post" trigger beats an "all posts + keyword" trigger. When the scores tie, the order falls back to the trigger's creation date.
The trigger list is filtered by the account's channel. Post comment, Mention, Story reply, Story mention and Post share appear on Instagram accounts only; those concepts have no counterpart on WhatsApp and, even if selected, would never fire.
Choices already saved in a flow are not removed: if the account's channel changes, the old trigger stays where it is, the pre-publish check warns you, and you decide what to do.
A flow can hold up to 20 triggers, and every one of them starts the same flow. It is the cleanest way to serve the same job through several doors: the "price" keyword, comments on your pricing post and conversations from your pricing ad can all lead into one flow.
You can still tell those doors apart inside the flow: the Flow started by condition says which trigger the run came from. You can open with "Thanks for your comment" for someone arriving from a comment, and go straight into the offer for someone arriving from an ad.
A single flow may also carry triggers belonging to different channels; each trigger has its own Channel choice, and if your account has one channel that choice does not matter.
The right trigger makes the flow start on the right person at the right moment; the rest is the steps' job.
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