Instagram Keyword DMs - Sending a PDF Automatically, and What Four Days Taught Us

A family counsellor we work with had four short guides for parents, each a PDF of a few pages. One about school refusal, one about attention, one about friendships, one about self-confidence. The plan was the usual one: a reel ends with "write SCHOOL in my DMs and I will send you the guide."

The usual plan has a usual problem. The reel does well, forty people write SCHOOL overnight, and the person who made the reel spends the next morning sending the same file forty times by hand, between sessions. Some people wait a day. A few never get it because their message sank under newer ones.

So we built it into TalkOmni. A document gets one or more keywords, and when a direct message is exactly that keyword, the PDF goes out in the same conversation. No model reads the message and decides. The word brings the file.

The numbers from the first four days

Between 23 and 26 September the school guide went to 22 people, with no failed sends. Most of them came from an organic reel, not from an ad. The busiest day was the 24th, with 16 requests, and nobody had to be at the phone for any of them.

That is a small campaign. We are telling you the size on purpose, because the lessons below came from a small campaign too, and they would have been more expensive on a big one.

The whole message has to be the keyword

This was a deliberate choice. Why not send the guide when someone writes "can I get the school guide please"?

Because then the assistant is guessing. "My son does not want to go to school, what should I do" contains the word too, and that person is asking for help, not for a PDF. Sending them a file instead of an answer would be the wrong thing at the worst moment. So the rule is strict: capital letters, the Turkish I and İ, and punctuation around the word do not matter, but the message has to be the word. A sentence goes to the assistant, which answers it like any other question.

Things that broke, and what we changed

The file name gets cut. On an iPhone the PDF arrives as a proper file card with an icon, a name and a size. The name is cut at around fifteen characters. "school-refusal-guide-for-parents-2026.pdf" becomes something unreadable. Keep the name short; you can set it separately from the file.

Instagram opens the file through Facebook. When someone taps the PDF, Instagram opens its own copy behind a "you are leaving Facebook" page. On 27 September some recipients could not get past that page. The file had been fetched from us fine every time; the problem sat between their phone and Meta. The counsellor now also puts the guide on her own website and writes that link into the short message that goes before the file, so there are two ways in.

Conversations held by a human did not get the file. This one we found in the data. The counsellor had 17 Instagram conversations in human hands, and 16 of them were pinned to her, because she answers many people herself. The first version only sent documents on conversations the assistant was handling, so anyone in those 16 threads who wrote SCHOOL got nothing. Now the keyword works on human-held conversations as well: the file goes out, the assistant stays quiet, and the conversation stays with her.

A sent file cannot be taken back. Instagram gives a business no way to delete a message it sent. If you upload a guide with a typo on page two, the people who already have it keep that version. Deleting the document only stops new sends. We say this in the panel before you delete, because it surprised us.

What it does not do

It does not answer comments under your posts. People sometimes expect "comment GUIDE" to work; it has to be a direct message. And the same person gets the same document at most three times in 24 hours, after which the assistant answers instead, so a loop or a bored teenager cannot pull the file endlessly.

Setting one up

Upload the PDF (up to 25 MB), give it a keyword, and optionally write a sentence to go before it and a tag to put on everyone who asks. The Requests list shows who asked and when, and opens their conversation. If you want the assistant to answer questions about the guide as well, one checkbox copies its text into the knowledge base.

The whole setup takes a few minutes. The part worth thinking about is the word itself: short, easy to type on a phone, and not something people write for any other reason.