Engagement (Comments)

The Social Engagement layer is a separate layer from Social Distribution. It generates and publishes first comments on new posts, and replies to user comments on your posts. It does not handle DMs, mentions, or a unified inbox — those features don't exist.

Supported platforms: Instagram and TikTok only.

Install

From the layers catalog → Social Engagement → Install. The initialize command defaults the engagement tone from your project's brand_voice setting.

What it does

Two engagement types:

• First comment — posts a brand-authored first comment on a newly synced own-account post. Triggered by post-sync events.
• Reply to comment — generates a reply to a user's comment on one of your posts. Triggered by comment-sync events. Daily budget is enforced via maxCommentsPerDay (default 20, max 100).

For third-party accounts (SideShift / managed distribution network) the layer can also comment on creators' posts and reply to comments there — scans run every 6 hours.

Modes

Per engagement type, per target (self vs thirdParty):

• off — disabled.
• automatic — Layers generates and publishes immediately (with an optional delay: autoReplyDelay 0–300s for first comments, replyDelay 30–600s for replies).
• draft — Layers generates but parks the comment in a pending queue for you to approve. publish-approved-comments fires every 10 minutes and publishes whatever has been approved.

Tone

config.engagement.tone picks one of six presets: authentic, witty, professional, warm, casual, educational. Leave unset to take the brand-voice default.

Daily budget

maxCommentsPerDay caps the total (first comments + replies) generated per day across all engagement types. Default 20, range 1–100.

Templates

Free-form guidance (one example per line) lives in:

• firstComment.commentTemplate — example first comments.
• replyToComments.replyTemplate — example replies.

These are fed to the LLM as few-shot examples.

Per-post reply cap

replyToComments.maxRepliesPerPost (default 5, max 20) stops the layer from flooding a single post with brand replies.

Privacy

Layers only uses the OAuth scopes granted at connection — for Instagram, instagram_business_manage_comments; for TikTok, comment.list + comment.list.manage. No DM access is requested or used.