What is Klaviyo’s newest feature, Klaviyo Social Marketing, and why should you be using it?

What is Klaviyo Social Marketing, showing the Instagram logo, Shopify and Klaviyo logo's showing how they connect with the Get Better logo sitting in the bottom right hand corner.

Klaviyo Social Marketing: How to Turn Instagram Engagement into Owned Marketing Gold

If you're a brand investing time and energy into Instagram, you'll know the frustration. The engagement is there; DMs, mentions, comment replies, but converting that into something you actually own, like an email list or SMS subscriber base, has always felt like a gap that couldn't quite be bridged.

That's exactly where Social Marketing comes in.

What is Social Marketing?

Social Marketing is a tool split between auto-replies and the social content library that sits between Instagram and Klaviyo, bridging the gap between social discovery and owned marketing. Put simply, it allows brands to capture email and SMS subscribers directly from high-intent social interactions such as DMs, mentions and follows,  without the customer ever needing to visit a website.

Since Klaviyo acquired Gatsby in 2024, the platform has continued to expand its social capabilities. The most recent addition is the Social Content Library, a centralised hub that surfaces all tagged UGC from Instagram Posts, Stories, and Reels, linked directly inside your Klaviyo account.

Beyond list growth, Klaviyo Social Marketing also tracks and maps user-generated content (UGC) back to individual Klaviyo profiles, enriching them with social behavioural signals that help you understand what's actually driving discovery and consideration for your brand.

If Klaviyo is your retention engine, Social Marketing is the pipeline that fills it from social.

The Problem It Solves

Marketers today are working across two very different worlds. Social interactions: likes, tags, DM’s all happening in one place. Owned marketing: email marketing, CRM, SMS campaigns, WhatsApp, RCS etc. happening in another. Without a clean way to connect the two, brands miss critical moments to capture subscribers and build lasting relationships.

Historically, social has been one of the most engaged marketing channels, but it's been notoriously difficult to tie that engagement back to email, SMS, or loyalty. Klaviyo Social Marketing changes that.

"How does it work?" with some images of the Social Marketing feature in action on Instagram through the DM feature.

How It Works

Converting Social Engagement into Subscribers

The mechanic is simple. An Instagram user sends a DM with a keyword or responds to a CTA. Klaviyo Social Marketing captures their email or phone number consent as part of an automated DM conversation and pushes that contact directly into Klaviyo as an email or SMS subscriber.

The best part? The customer never leaves Instagram. There's no pop-up form, no redirect to a landing page, no friction. They just DM, and they're in.

Social interactions, likes, mentions, and DMs are also passed through as events and properties on Klaviyo profiles, meaning every engagement becomes usable data inside your marketing strategy.

The Step-by-Step Flow

Here's how it looks in practice as an example:

  1. A user messages a keyword (e.g. "GO") to your Instagram account.

  2. An automated DM response asks them to reply with their email address.

  3. They do. Behind the scenes, Social Marketing captures that email and populates a Klaviyo event to opt them into your list.

  4. A rich image card appears in the DM thread with a one-click "Subscribe to Email" button.

  5. They tap it. They're subscribed. A confirmation message fires back, and if you've set it up, the flow continues to ask for their phone number to capture SMS consent too.

The whole thing happens inside Instagram DMs, and the subscriber lands in your Klaviyo list, ready to enter flows.

Setting It Up

It's more straightforward than you might think. Here's the setup process:

  • Log in to Klaviyo, go to Settings > Auto Replies, and follow the login steps to connect your Instagram. Note: If you're connecting Instagram, use Facebook Login rather than Instagram Login as certain features, including the Social Content Library, only populate with a Facebook Login connection.

  • Head to the Social Section > Auto-Replies.

  • Build out an auto-reply campaign relevant to your strategy — either through DMs or Comments.

  • Assign a Klaviyo list to the campaign, with relevant flows connected.

  • Optionally add your SMS list ID if you're collecting phone subscribers too.

In short: connect Klaviyo Social Marketing to your Instagram and Klaviyo accounts, design your Instagram campaign (giveaway, newsletter sign-up, incentive), and watch subscribers enter your flows and segments.

The events that Social Marketing can send to Klaviyo. Dm'ed on Social, Mentioned You and Instagram_Followed_You_Gatsby.

Events in Klaviyo

Once Social Marketing is connected, it pushes the following events into Klaviyo profiles:

  • DM'd on Social — triggered when a subscriber sends your brand an Instagram DM, including the message content, their Instagram handle, follower count, and follow status.

  • Mentioned You — fired when someone tags your brand in a post or story.

  • Instagram_Followed_You — triggered when someone follows your account.

  • Subscribed to List — the standard Klaviyo event, fired when they complete the opt-in.

These events can be used to trigger flows, build segments, and personalise communications based on direct social interactions.

Profile Properties and Segmentation

When someone signs up via Social Marketing, a set of rich profile properties is added to their Klaviyo record:

  • InstagramFollowerCount

  • InstagramFollowsYou

  • InstagramKeyword

  • InstagramProfileImage

  • InstagramUsername

This data opens up some genuinely exciting segmentation and campaign opportunities. A few ideas:

Identify high-follower accounts. Build a segment of subscribers with over a certain follower count and trigger a flow to invite them into an affiliate programme or collaboration.

Target non-followers. Send a dedicated campaign to subscribers who haven't yet followed you on Instagram,  a nudge to deepen that cross-channel relationship.

Segment by DM content. Use the "DM'd on Social" event to build a segment of customers who messaged you in the last 30 days, or who used a specific keyword like "early access",  then target them accordingly.

Show/hide logic in emails. Use follower count or follow status as conditions inside your email templates to show different content to different segments without sending separate campaigns. Eg. Using it to surface potential affiliates, influencers and micro-influencers that you could potentially work with.

The new Social Content Library now gives you a dedicated place to review and bookmark this tagged content directly inside Klaviyo which you can use in your marketing channel comms.

Flows You Can Build

When you connect Social Marketing to Klaviyo, you'll automatically receive flow templates, including:

  • Followed Your Instagram — triggered when someone new follows you on Instagram.

  • Instagram UGC — triggered based on mentions or tags.

Beyond the templates, there's a lot you can build:

Welcome flows based on campaign type. If someone signed up via a giveaway, their welcome series should reflect that. If they came in via a 10% discount incentive, their flow should deliver and nurture around that. Social Marketing lets you connect different keywords to different Klaviyo lists, so each welcome series can be fully tailored.

Thank you for mentioning. Build a flow that fires when a customer tags your brand in a post, thanking them and encouraging them to tag their next purchase too. A small but powerful moment of connection that builds brand loyalty.

Grow Smarter With More Personal, Profitable Paid Ads

Here's the bit most brands miss. The same Instagram data powering your service and UGC flows can do double duty on your ad spend.

Once social engagement sits in Klaviyo next to your purchase and email data, you're not guessing who your best customers are. You know. Build segments around them and sync straight to Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest and more for sharper lookalike targeting.

It works in both directions. Go and find new customers who look like your best ones. Then win back the people already in your orbit: browsers, cart abandoners, engaged followers, using data you actually own rather than whatever the platform decides to report back.

Either way, every pound of ad spend is chasing a signal you trust, not a metric you're hoping is telling the truth.

The Social Content Library, with images showing examples how the reels, images and UGC that the brand accounts are tagged into by their customers

The Social Content Library

Klaviyo has recently rolled out a new addition to Social Marketing: the Social Content Library.

Whereas the Events section above captures social interactions as data points against Klaviyo profiles utilising the social auto-replies feature. It gives you access to every public Instagram Post, Story, and Reel where your brand has been tagged, organised in one place inside Klaviyo.

At a glance, you can see:

  • Total tagged posts and unique creators

  • Engagement rates, likes, and comments across all tagged content

  • Potential reach based on creator follower counts

You can filter by media type, bookmark standout content, search by creator handle, and sort by engagement all within the Klaviyo UI.

It's available on the paid Social Marketing plan with Facebook Login authentication, and Klaviyo back-populates up to 200 previously tagged posts and Reels so you're not starting from zero.

Integrating social proofing directly into Klaviyo to then deploy it strategically within Email, WhatsApp and RCS channels opens up even more opportunities to strategically deploy some more UGC psychological levers within marketing comms.

Beyond Klaviyo: Wider Integrations

Social Marketing doesn't just plug into Klaviyo. It integrates across your wider tech stack, allowing you to:

  • Reward loyalty points for Instagram actions — connect with LoyaltyLion, Smile.io or other Loyalty platforms to give points for follows, mentions, or DMs.

  • Collect Instagram handles at checkout — use Rebuy's smart cart to add an Instagram follow prompt at the point of purchase.

  • Layer social context into support tickets — connect with Klaviyo Customer Agent or Gorgias so your team can see Klaviyo and Shopify data alongside Instagram DM tickets, reducing friction across channels.

Why This Matters for Your Brand

Social engagement has always been hard to act on inside owned channels. Social Marketing changes that.

Every DM becomes a signal. Every mention becomes a data point. Every follow becomes a potential subscriber. And all of that feeds directly into Klaviyo, where you can segment, automate, and personalise at scale.

For brands serious about growing their owned lists and connecting their social presence to their retention strategy, Social Marketing is one of the more exciting tools we've seen come along in a while.

If you'd like to explore how Social Marketing could work for your brand inside your Klaviyo setup, get in touch with the Get Better team, we'd love to walk you through it.



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