15 · Logging a direct message
What you will have done: recorded a message you sent or received on somebody’s own platform, so their timeline is whole, and understood why the engine will never send one for you.
Why Neutron does not send them
Neutron sends letters. It does not send direct messages, on any platform, ever.
The engine holds every automated message to the same rules: an approval before the first one, a consent basis where the person is an individual, a suppression list that outranks everything, a held reason when any of that is not true. Those rules are enforced on the way to a mailbox because that is the road the engine drives.
A message on Instagram or LinkedIn goes down a road it does not drive. So the engine does not pretend to: it never sends one, and it never claims to have seen one. You write it yourself, from your own account, and then you tell the ledger it happened.
That is not a gap in the record. Every touch is a row, and a row typed in by hand is the same row as one the inbox wrote, on the same timeline, counted by the same screens.
The walkthrough
1. Open the person
Revenue › Pipeline, then click their card. The drawer holds their timeline: every letter out, every reply in, newest first.
2. Log what happened
Choose Log a message and fill in three things.
| What it asks | What to put |
|---|---|
| Channel | Where it happened: a call, a meeting, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube. |
| Direction | Out if you reached them, in if they reached you. |
| What happened | One line, in your own words. It is what the timeline will show. |
Email and WhatsApp are not on that list, and that is deliberate. Those two move through Neutron and record themselves when the message actually goes. A hand-typed line on either would sit in the ledger looking exactly like a letter that was sent, and a history that reads as whole while being wrong is worse than one with a gap in it.
3. Know which address it lands on
A message on somebody’s own platform is filed against their handle on that platform, not their email address. Their Instagram message went to their Instagram, and stamping their work address on it would make the timeline read as if you had written to them there.
So the person needs a handle on that channel before you can log a message on it. If they have none, the refusal says so and tells you to add one first.
4. Move them yourself if the conversation moved
Logging a message records it. It does nothing else: it does not label anything, does not cancel a follow-up, and does not move the person along the board.
Nothing in a direct message is read by the engine. If they said yes, move their card forward yourself. If they asked to be left alone, move them to unsubscribed and stop the campaign writing to them. The automatic reading in journey 5 is about mail, which is the only thing the engine can see.
5. Or just say it in chat
Everything above can be asked for instead of clicked.
“Log an Instagram message out to Nell Harrowfield: asked whether she ships wholesale.”
The agent writes the same row, through the same rules, and the refusals are the same. Journey 11 has the rest of what you can ask for.
A worked example
Meridian Supply are working a list of makers who sell direct. One of them, Nell Harrowfield, has no company and no address, only @harrowfieldmakes on Instagram, so no letter has ever gone to her and none can.
Somebody messages her from the company’s own Instagram account and she answers the same day. Two touches get logged: one out, one in, both on Instagram, both filed against her handle.
Her timeline now reads as a conversation rather than as silence, the campaign’s touch counts include her, and the next person to open her card can see that she has already been spoken to.
What to do if
The channel you want is not offered. If it is email or WhatsApp, it never will be; those record themselves. Anything else is a platform the ledger does not hold yet.
It refuses because there is no handle on file. Add their handle to the person first, then log the message. The engine will not guess which account you wrote to.
You logged it against the wrong person. Log the right one and say so in the line. A touch is a record of what happened and is not edited away.
Somebody asked by direct message to be left alone. The engine did not read that and will not act on it. Move them to unsubscribed yourself, and if you hold an address for them, put it on the suppression list so no campaign can reach it again.
Confirm it worked: open the person on the Pipeline. The message is on their timeline, with the channel it happened on and the handle it went to.