The reply is where the sale happens, and almost nobody replies. Brands answer about 3 percent of the comments left on their posts, which means the part of social media management that costs nothing is the part being skipped hardest. If you post four times a week and answer nothing, you have built a noticeboard rather than a shop.
Ama sells shea-based skincare from a two-room workspace in Accra, with her sister packing orders. Her TikTok does well enough. A clip of her whipping body butter passed sixty thousand views and brought in about four hundred comments, most of them some version of "price?" and "do you ship to Kumasi?". She read them, felt good about the numbers, and answered maybe fifteen. Three weeks later she was wondering why a viral video had produced eleven orders.
Almost every comment on the internet goes unanswered
Respondology's 2026 Business of Comments report analysed 169 million comments across seven platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn, and found 97 percent of them got no reply. That includes praise, product questions and people plainly saying they want to buy.
The number is so lopsided that it stops being a customer service statistic and becomes a competitive one. Answering comments is not a standard you are failing to meet. It is a thing almost nobody does, which is why doing it works.
The people reading your comments are not the people writing them
The same report found 68 percent of buyers read the comments before deciding to purchase. That reframes what a reply is for. You are not writing to the one person who asked. You are writing to the forty who scrolled down to see whether this business is real, whether the product arrives, and whether anyone here answers.
An unanswered comment saying "is this legit?" sits under your post for as long as the post exists. So does the answer.
A reply is worth more than you think in cash terms
Among direct-to-consumer brands in that data, 4 to 6 percent of comments carried direct buying intent, and those converted at around 11 percent when the brand actually replied. Run that on Ama's video. Four hundred comments, five percent with real intent, is twenty people who wanted to buy. At 11 percent that is two orders she would otherwise not have got, from one video, for the price of typing twenty replies.
Two orders sounds small. It is small. It also repeats on every video forever, costs nothing but attention, and compounds because each answered thread makes the next viewer trust the next post.
The window is about an hour, and most businesses miss it by hours
Customer expectation has moved much faster than business practice. Roughly 76 percent of customers who complain on social media expect a response within the hour, while only about 24 percent of businesses manage it, according to Kayako's compilation of social media customer service benchmarks. Typical first replies get measured in hours, not minutes.
For a Nigerian or Ghanaian small business this is the whole opportunity. The buyer who asks your price at 9pm is asking three other vendors the same thing. The one who answers first usually gets the order, and price comes second more often than owners believe.
What to answer and what to leave alone
Answer anything with a question mark, anything that names a place, and anything that says a version of "how much". Those are people trying to give you money.
Complaints get answered in public, briefly, and moved to a DM. One line acknowledging it, one line saying what you will do, then take it out of the thread. What you must not do is delete it, because the forty silent readers can see when a thread has been cleaned.
Ignore spam and bait. About one in five comments in that same study were spam, bot activity or abuse, so a fifth of your notifications deserve nothing from you. Learning to scroll past them quickly is a skill.
A routine that fits in twenty minutes
Ama now does two passes a day. Morning, before the workshop gets busy, she clears everything from the night before. Evening, around eight, she catches the day. Anything asking a price gets the price and a link to her WhatsApp, not a "check DM".
She keeps six saved replies in her notes app: shipping to Accra, shipping outside Accra, the full price list, ingredients, how long delivery takes, and how to order. Most comments are one of those six with a different name attached. Copy, paste, adjust one word, send.
That routine took her from fifteen replies out of four hundred to answering nearly everything, and it costs her twenty minutes a day.
When answering everything is the wrong call
If your inbox is mostly people negotiating a price you cannot lower, the problem is your pricing post, not your reply rate. Fix the post so it names the price and the minimum order, and the volume of pointless DMs drops by half.
There is a scale problem too. One person can hold maybe three hundred comments a day across platforms. Past that, replies get slower and worse, and a bad reply is more damaging than none. That is the point where you either hire somebody or accept that some threads go unanswered, and the honest answer is to prioritise anything with buying intent and let compliments go.
Where a tool helps
Software cannot have the conversation for you, and you should be suspicious of anything claiming it can. What it can do is stop you from missing the comment in the first place: put every platform's comments in one place, draft a reply you edit before it sends, and flag the complaints that need a human now. That is what Engage inside Threadovo is for, alongside the planning and publishing side. Pricing starts at ₦39,000 a month with a 14-day trial and no card, and the details are on the pricing page.
Agencies feel this hardest, because a comment on a client's post is the client's reputation and they usually find out about it after the client does. Running each client in a separate workspace with its own inbox is the difference between catching that in ten minutes and catching it in a phone call.
The rest of it is discipline. Twice a day, twenty minutes, answer the people asking to buy.
Questions people ask
How fast should a business reply to comments and DMs?
Within an hour during working hours is the standard buyers expect, and about three quarters of people who complain on social expect that hour. If that is not realistic for you, two scheduled passes a day, morning and evening, will still put you ahead of most competitors.
Do replies to comments actually increase sales?
Yes, measurably. In Respondology's data, 4 to 6 percent of comments on direct-to-consumer brand posts showed buying intent and converted at about 11 percent when the brand replied, and 68 percent of buyers read comments before purchasing at all.
Should I answer negative comments or delete them?
Answer them, briefly and publicly, then move the conversation to a DM. Deleting is visible to anyone who was following the thread and it reads as guilt, while a short calm reply is read by everyone who scrolls past afterwards.
Is it fine to reply with "check your DM"?
It works badly. The person who asked has to switch apps, and the readers who scrolled down for the price learn nothing. Put the price in the comment and offer the DM for anything specific.
How do I handle comments when I get hundreds a day?
Sort by intent instead of by time. Questions, prices and place names first, complaints second, compliments when there is room, spam never. Saved replies for your six most common questions will cover most of the volume.