Groups, tags & caps

Groups is where the shape of your audience lives. Get this page right and every send afterwards is two clicks.

Importing groups#

Every WhatsApp group the linked account belongs to appears here automatically after history sync. There's nothing to upload.

PromotionBot cannot create groups, join groups, or add members. If you want to reach a group, add the linked account to it from WhatsApp like a normal member. This is a hard boundary of the product, and it's also the line the fair-use policy draws: message communities you're part of, not strangers.

A group that appears after the initial import — because you joined it later, or because sync was skipped — shows up once there's activity in it.

Tags#

A tag (the app also says category) is a label on a group: first-year, alumni, committees, sports, partners. Tags are the targeting mechanism. You tag once, then send to alumni forever instead of re-picking the same eleven groups.

Rules worth knowing:

• One tag per group. A group is in exactly one bucket at a time. If you need overlapping audiences, that's what presets are for.
• New groups land in general. That default bucket is the app's way of saying "not classified yet". Tagging at least one group off general is what unlocks Compose.
• You define your own tags. There's no fixed list to work around.

Presets#

A preset is a named bundle of tags — everyone = all six year groups plus alumni; internal = board plus committees. Presets let you keep tags narrow (which is what makes analytics useful) without making routine sends tedious.

AI auto-tag#

If AI is enabled on your deployment, PromotionBot can read your group names and propose tags for all of them in one pass. It's genuinely good at "Year 3 — Economics" and useless at "chat 🎉🎉". Treat it as a first draft: run it, then fix the ones it got wrong.

There's a quick-recategorise control for exactly that clean-up pass.

Daily and weekly caps#

A daily cap is the maximum number of messages one group may receive from you in a day, counted per group. It's the single most effective setting in the app for not being muted.

• The default is deliberately low. One or two per day is right for almost everyone.
• The ceiling is 10 per day, and it cannot be raised past that — not by you, not by us, not on any plan. It's an anti-ban guard, not a plan feature.
• A group at its cap is skipped, not queued. The rest of the send goes out normally, and Compose warns you before you send.

You can optionally add a weekly cap on top. Use it for audiences where "twice a day" is defensible but "fourteen a week" is not — alumni, partners, anyone who didn't sign up for a firehose. Whichever cap is tighter wins.

Caps interact with the cooldown, which is a different gate: the cooldown stops one campaign or event from repeating into the same group (20 hours), while caps limit volume from all sources. Both are explained together in How PromotionBot works.

Group health#

Groups drift. People leave, committees dissolve, a group made for one event never speaks again. Sending into a dead group is wasted volume that still counts against your plan and still looks like broadcasting to WhatsApp.

Groups shows health signals so you can spot this: how recently a group had activity, how much you've sent into it, and whether it looks dormant.

Inactive groups#

You can review groups with no activity for longer than a threshold you choose, then mark them inactive.

• An inactive group is never messaged, by any send, from any source. It's the hardest of the four gates.
• It stays in your list, keeps its tag, and keeps its history — this isn't deletion.
• Reactivate it any time.

Running this review once a term is the cheapest way to keep your reach numbers honest and your sends focused on groups that are actually alive.

Where to go next#

• Compose & send — turn these tags into a send.
• Analytics — see which tags actually click, then retag accordingly.
• Staying unbanned — why the caps exist and what happens when you push them.