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Automatic Contact Creation

Turn on automatic contact creation so a new HubSpot contact is made whenever a first-time sender messages you from a social channel.

Written by Tarek Khalil

When to use it

If you run Instagram, Messenger, or Telegram through Octopods, your customers can reach out without ever having been in HubSpot before. Automatic contact creation closes that gap — every first-time sender becomes a HubSpot contact, keeping your CRM in sync with the people actually messaging you.

Where the setting lives

Each channel has its own automatic contact creation toggle so you can enable it on some channels and not others.

  1. Sign in to Octopods and open your HubSpot workspace.

  2. Open the channel you want to configure (Instagram, Messenger, or Telegram).

  3. Scroll to the Create HubSpot Contact for Channel Users section.

Turn the feature on

  1. In the Create HubSpot Contact for Channel Users section, select the Yes radio (labeled “Create a HubSpot contact when a new conversation starts”).

  2. Open the Advanced contact matching & identification section.

  3. Pick a Channel identifier. The two options are Username (the person’s handle on the channel — for example, their Telegram username) and User ID (the opaque, channel-issued identifier for the sender).

  4. Pick a HubSpot contact property to store the identifier on.

  5. Click Update HubSpot Contact Creation to save.

Note: Messenger does not return a username, so only the User ID option is available for Messenger channels.

How matching and creation work once enabled

When a new message arrives on the channel, Octopods:

  1. Reads the channel identifier you selected from the incoming message.

  2. Searches your HubSpot contacts for a match on the property you chose.

  3. If a contact matches, attaches the conversation to that existing contact.

  4. If no contact matches, creates a new HubSpot contact and populates the property with the identifier.

New contacts are created with the best available name data from the channel (first and last name) alongside the identifier property you selected.

Turn the feature off

  1. In the Create HubSpot Contact for Channel Users section, select the No radio (labeled “Do not create HubSpot contacts automatically”).

  2. Click Update HubSpot Contact Creation.

When the feature is off, messages still arrive in your HubSpot inbox, but no new contact records are created and conversations from unknown senders won’t be linked to a CRM contact.

If you see a permissions warning

If the HubSpot token Octopods has doesn’t include permission to read and write contacts, the settings panel shows an “Additional Permissions Required” warning with the message “The current HubSpot portal lacks the ‘contacts’ permission. Please reconnect your HubSpot account to enable this feature.” Click Reconnect HubSpot to reauthorize the integration with the correct scopes, then return to the settings page.

Important: Only workspace admins can change automatic contact creation settings.

What’s next

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