ReachleeProspective students DM before they apply.
Answer them the same minute.
"Is the January intake still open?" "What IELTS score do I need?" "Can I visit campus?" Applicants ask on Instagram first, at every hour, from every time zone. Reachlee sends the course page, the open-day sign-up and the answers your team wrote, and hands anything about one person's application to a member of staff.
The short answer
Universities can automate the repeat questions prospective students send on Instagram and Facebook: course links, entry requirements, fees, deadlines, open days, scholarships and accommodation. Reachlee replies in seconds from what your team wrote, in the student's language, and collects an email for the open day. It never starts a conversation, never makes an admissions decision, and flags applicant-specific questions for a person to answer.
Where admissions questions actually arrive
For a growing share of applicants, the first contact with a university is not the enquiry form on the website. It is a comment under a course reel, a reply to a student-life story, or a DM sent late at night while comparing four universities in four tabs. The questions are predictable: is the programme still open for this intake, what are the entry requirements, what does it cost, is there a scholarship, where would I live, when is the next open day. The difficulty is timing. The social media team runs the account, admissions owns the answers, and international applicants write while your office is asleep. A message that waits until Monday is a message the student has often stopped caring about, because another university answered on Saturday. None of this needs a chatbot that improvises. It needs the answers your team already gives a hundred times a cycle, sent the moment the question arrives, and a clear route to a person for everything else.
- General questions (requirements, fees, deadlines, intakes, accommodation) are the same for every applicant and can be written down once.
- Personal questions (my grades, my application status, my visa situation) need a named person and should never get an automated guess.
- International enquiries land overnight in your time zone, when nobody is staffing the inbox.
- Course reels reach people who don't follow you yet, so the first DM has to work for strangers.
- No tool can message an applicant first: the student has to comment, reply to a story or send a DM.
Automate the prospectus, not the admissions decision
The useful line in higher education is between information and judgement. Information is anything your prospectus, course pages or fees table already states: the IELTS or TOEFL minimum, the application deadline for each intake, tuition per year, the scholarships that exist and who can apply, the accommodation options, the open-day dates. That can be answered instantly and identically for everyone. Judgement is anything that depends on one person: whether their grades are enough, what happened to their application, whether their circumstances qualify for an exception. Reachlee keeps to that line by design. Reachlee AI may only state facts and links that appear in the knowledge you wrote, so it cannot estimate a fee, promise an offer or improvise a deadline. When a question falls outside your knowledge, or a student asks for a person, or the message reads like a complaint, the conversation is marked Needs you in the Inbox and your team gets an email or Telegram alert with the student's words, ready to answer.
- Answers come only from knowledge your team wrote and keeps current.
- No reply ever states an admissions outcome or a fee you didn't publish.
- Questions it can't answer are flagged for a person instead of guessed.
- Once a staff member replies in a thread, the AI stays out of it for 48 hours.
Setting it up before the next intake
Connect the university's accounts
Sign in with Google and connect your Instagram professional account through Meta's official login, so no password is ever shared. Facebook Pages connect the same way from Pro. Faculties or campuses with their own accounts connect separately, each with its own automations and knowledge.
Write the facts down once
Programmes with their page links, entry and English-language requirements, fees per year, deadlines for each intake, scholarships, accommodation and open-day dates. Keyword automations send the message you write; on Growth the same facts become the AI's knowledge for open-ended questions.
Put keywords on course content
Add an automation so a comment like PROSPECTUS or MBA sends that programme's page as a DM, with a short public reply under the comment so other viewers see it works. On Pro, one automation covers up to 10 posts about the same programme, or every post with Any post.
Add the open-day sign-up
Create an automation from the Event sign-up template under Flow templates. A comment like VISIT gets a Save my spot button, then a request for an email, then the event details link. Everyone who gives an email is added to an Event sign-ups folder you can rename per event.
Route personal questions to people
On Growth, switch on AI replies and choose how Needs you alerts reach your team in Settings → Notifications: instant or in a digest, by email, or on Telegram once it's connected under Settings → Integrations. Staff answer from the shared Inbox, where every flagged conversation waits with the reason.
Six parts that carry an admissions cycle
Course links from a comment
Each programme gets its own keyword and its own DM, with a tracked link so you can see which course pages applicants actually open. Links to people who don't follow you are sent as plain text first, which is how Instagram delivers them reliably to strangers.
Open-day sign-ups with an email
The Event sign-up flow turns a comment into a registered visitor: tap, email, folder, details. It runs on the Free plan, which keeps up to 3 folders, and the email is what lets you remind people after Instagram's messaging window has closed.
Answers in the applicant's language
On Growth, Reachlee AI replies in the language the student wrote in, across more than 20 languages, from your knowledge only. It skips greetings and emoji, so a 'hi' doesn't trigger a paragraph about tuition.
Needs you for individual cases
Complaints, requests for a person and questions your knowledge doesn't cover become flagged conversations with the student's own words. Alerts follow your rules: instant or digest, quiet hours at night, email or Telegram.
Ice breakers on an empty chat
Tappable questions such as When is the deadline? or Can I visit campus? appear before a student has written anything, each with its own automatic answer. Free includes 2, Pro up to 4.
Faculties and campuses in one workspace
Pro connects 3 Instagram accounts or Facebook Pages. Business connects 10, adds 5 team seats so admissions and marketing share one Inbox, and sends captured details to Google Sheets as they arrive.
Three weeks every admissions office recognises
The open-day reel
You post a campus-tour reel and the comments fill with 'how do I register?'. The social team copies the sign-up link into replies for two days, misses half of them, and has no list of who said yes.
VISIT comments get the Event sign-up flow automatically. Everyone who gives an email lands in the Event sign-ups folder, and the week before the event you email that list and send a campaign that reaches each person as they next message you.
The overnight international enquiry
A student in another time zone asks about English requirements and the deadline at what is 3 a.m. for you. The reply goes out the next afternoon, by which point they have started an application elsewhere.
Reachlee AI answers from your knowledge in seconds, in the language they wrote in. Their follow-up about whether their own transcript qualifies is marked Needs you, and an adviser answers it first thing in the morning with the conversation already in front of them.
The week offers go out
Offer and results posts collect a wave of comments about deposits, accommodation and enrolment dates. By the time anyone gets to them, the early ones are days old.
A keyword automation answers new comments as they arrive, and a Retrigger run works through the comments already on the post from the last 7 days, skipping anyone who already got a reply. Anything personal is left to staff.
What a university actually needs
Free: 1 Instagram account, 1,000 DMs a month, 100 active contacts and 10 saved leads, enough to pilot one programme keyword and an open-day flow. Pro ($9/mo): 3 Instagram accounts or Facebook Pages, unlimited DMs, contacts and leads, one automation across several posts, follow-ups, Retrigger, and campaigns you can schedule and keep open for latecomers. Growth ($14/mo): Reachlee AI with 1,000 credits a month for open-ended questions, and Needs you flags when it can't answer. Business ($29/mo): 10 accounts, 5 team seats, Google Sheets and 2,500 AI credits. A central team with several faculty accounts usually lands on Business.
Start freeInstagram automation for universities, answered plainly.
Can we message students who applied, enquired last year or follow us?
No, and no tool on Meta's official API can. A business can only reply: the student has to comment, reply to or react to a story, or send a DM first, and free-form messages are allowed for 24 hours after their last message. A follow, an application on your portal or an enquiry from last year grants no messaging rights. What works is inviting the message: a keyword in the reel, a story asking people to reply, ice breakers on the chat. Collecting an email during the conversation is what lets you stay in touch after the window closes.
Could the AI tell an applicant they will get in?
It is built not to. Reachlee AI may only state facts and links that appear in the knowledge your team wrote, so if your knowledge lists entry requirements, it can repeat them, but it cannot judge whether a particular student meets them or predict an outcome. When it isn't sure, it says the team will follow up, or sends nothing. Questions about one person's grades, application status or circumstances are exactly what Needs you is for: the conversation is flagged with their words and a member of staff answers.
Will it sound like a bot to an 18-year-old?
Replies come from your own account, in the tone you set, and stay short: AI replies are kept under 500 characters, and keyword messages are whatever you write. Greetings, emoji and small talk are skipped rather than answered with a wall of text. Before switching AI on, you can try it in the AI Playground on Growth, typing as a student would, and nothing is sent. Once a staff member replies in a conversation, the AI steps out of that thread for 48 hours.
Is this allowed, and is a university account at any risk?
Yes, it's allowed. Reachlee runs on Meta's official Instagram and Messenger APIs and is a Meta-verified Tech Provider, so nobody logs in as you and no password is shared. It never messages anyone first, sends one private reply per comment within Instagram's 7-day window, respects the 24-hour messaging window, paces sends and pauses an account when Meta asks it to. Accounts get restricted for scraping, mass-following and cold messaging, none of which Reachlee does.
Our faculties run separate accounts. How does that work?
Each Instagram account or Facebook Page connects separately with its own automations and its own knowledge, so the business school can answer about its MBA intakes while the medical faculty answers about its own requirements. Pro covers 3 accounts, with one Inbox that switches between them; Business covers 10 with 5 team seats, which is usually what a central admissions team with faculty marketers needs.
Does it connect to our admissions CRM?
There is no direct connector to admissions or student-record systems. Emails and phone numbers captured in DMs are saved to the contact, and paid plans export contacts as CSV for your CRM import. Business adds Google Sheets, where each captured enquiry arrives as a row in real time, which many teams use as the hand-off point to their CRM or call list.
Does it work on our Facebook Page as well?
Yes, from Pro. Facebook Pages get comment-to-Messenger, keyword replies, ice breakers, email and phone capture and, on Growth, Reachlee AI answers from that Page's own knowledge. Two things stay Instagram-only because Meta offers no equivalent on Pages: story-reply automations and follow checks. Pages only; personal profiles and Facebook Groups can't be automated through Meta's API.
Instagram