Ten years of Influencer Marketing have produced one reliable outcome: awareness. The conversion layer is still largely improvised. 

Linqia, an independent Influencer Marketing agency, is starting with the comment section. The company has launched Linqia DM, a product that turns comment triggers on sponsored creator posts into automated DM flows, routing interested viewers to product pages, sweepstakes, lead-qualification forms, and first-party data capture without the creator lifting a finger.

“Brands have long desired a better way for creators to drive actionability in their posts, beyond the limited functionality of linking in Instagram stories or sending people to a creator’s link in bio,” says Daniel Schotland, Linqia’s Chief Product & Business Officer.

Daniel has been at Linqia since 2017, arriving from TubeMogul, the programmatic video platform acquired by Adobe, where he served as Chief Client Officer. Before that, he spent nearly a decade at Experian CheetahMail building client services infrastructure for Fortune 1000 companies. That cross-channel background, spanning email, programmatic video, and now influencer, shapes how he frames the conversion problem Linqia DM is designed to solve. 

Founded in 2012, Linqia has worked with more than 650 brands, including Danone, Instacart, and Bayer.

The Gap Between a Like and a Sale

From Daniel’s perspective, the Influencer Marketing conversion problem is structural, not creative. Social platforms are built to keep users inside the feed, not to route them efficiently to purchase pages. “Link in bio” has always been a workaround, and one that loses most of the audience that expressed intent but was unwilling to navigate away.

Daniel traces the timing of Linqia DM to three converging forces. Consumer behavior has shifted toward in-feed commerce: buyers increasingly resist leaving their social environment to complete a transaction. Brand expectations have also moved, with enterprise clients treating influencer as a full-funnel investment rather than an awareness-only line item. The third factor is technological: platforms including Manychat and Stampede Social have built the automation infrastructure to make comment-triggered DM flows workable at campaign scale.

“Influencer is still viewed by many brands through a mainly transactional lens,” Daniel says. “But its utility extends all the way down to lower-funnel conversion. With a focus on affiliate-style activations, the extension of creator content to fuel lower-funnel performance media, and new tools like Linqia DM, influencer is quickly becoming a measurable and high-performing lower-funnel strategy.”

How the Comment Section Becomes a Storefront

Linqia DM operates on a trigger-response model embedded directly into Linqia’s managed campaigns. A creator posts sponsored content with a specific call to action, asking viewers to comment a keyword to receive an offer, discount code, or product information. When that trigger comment arrives, the creator’s handle automatically sends a personalized, brand-approved DM without manual intervention from the creator or the brand.

The automated flow that follows can distribute promotional codes, direct users to product pages, deliver sweepstakes entries, gather qualification data for longer purchase cycles, or handle basic customer support queries. All interactions are logged, giving brands real-time visibility into reply rates, click-through volumes, and lead qualification activity.

“For the first time, brands can maintain an unbroken loop of attribution from an organic comment to a customer conversion,” Daniel says.

A recent Buffer report found that Instagram posts where creators replied to comments generated 21% more engagement. Linqia DM aims to automate that response at scale, without placing the operational burden on the creator. Creators retain control over the voice of each automated reply and can opt out of the feature entirely.

A Different Creative Brief

The tool requires a rethinking of how campaigns are structured from the start. Rather than designing posts around passive hooks, Linqia DM campaigns use caption structures, on-screen overlays, and content pacing tuned to generate comment interactions. The call to action shifts from a general directive to a specific trigger.

“Instead of relying on passive hooks like ‘link in bio,’ content can be architected with clear keyword triggers,” Daniel explains. “Content pacing, on-screen text overlays, and caption structures are all tailored to incentivize comment interactions rather than standard link clicks.”

Brands accustomed to treating the caption as supplementary copy will need to reconsider how their creators set up a trigger, and how that trigger connects to the offer waiting inside the automated DM flow.

First-Party Data Without the Trade-Off

Privacy regulations have eroded the behavioral data layer that programmatic campaigns relied on, and the alternatives have uneven coverage, according to Daniel. Linqia DM offers a different entry point.

“Because users voluntarily opt-in by using a trigger word, brands collect privacy-compliant data through organic conversations,” Daniel notes. “This data can be seamlessly integrated into a brand’s CRM or CDP to facilitate targeted customer experiences and media activations.”

For high-consideration categories, including finance, automotive, and technology, where purchase cycles are long and lead qualification is expensive, the ability to gather intent signals inside a social-native conversation carries real operational value. Daniel identifies D2C and e-commerce brands, CPG and retail advertisers, and these high-consideration verticals as the clearest fits for the current product.

Platform Dependency and the Resilience Question

Linqia DM was built on top of two existing conversational automation platforms: Manychat, which has wide recognition among creators and required minimal onboarding, and Stampede Social, which provides the agency-scale tools needed to manage multiple brand campaigns simultaneously. Daniel frames the choice as a credibility decision as much as a technical one.

The dependency on platform API access is a structural risk the company acknowledges. Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook Messenger terms have shifted before, and the automation flows that Linqia DM relies on require ongoing platform cooperation. Daniel’s answer is ecosystem diversification: adding additional automation partners over time so no single integration point becomes a single point of failure.

“Audiences naturally follow where creators build,” he says, expressing confidence that platforms will continue to support tools that increase creator engagement and monetization. “Our strategy is to build a resilient ecosystem of partners around each solution.”

From Comment to Conversion Engine

The near-term version of Linqia DM is keyword-triggered and flow-based. The version Daniel describes in two to three years is substantially more autonomous. “An AI assistant will conduct fluid dialogs within the message window, recommending complementary products, building carts based on preferences, and processing secure one-click checkouts, without the user ever leaving the social app,” he says.

That trajectory places Linqia DM inside a broader shift: social platforms are increasingly the point of both discovery and purchase, and the creator relationship with an audience is becoming the most direct channel between attention and transaction. Automated conversational tools are the infrastructure layer bridging the two.

Daniel’s broader view is that brands have consistently underinvested in the depth of their creator relationships. Short-term, campaign-by-campaign partnerships leave performance on the table. 

“Brands that invest in longer-term, more strategic partnerships with creators benefit from much better brand-influencer alignment, shorter turnaround cycles, and outsized performance results,” he says.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Check Out Our Podcast