Somewhere in your business there is a queue of people asking to be sold to, and it is being answered with a heart emoji.
Comments and DMs are the only part of social where the audience speaks first. Everything else is you guessing. And yet replies are the task that gets delegated furthest down, done fastest, and measured not at all.
Answer the question behind the question
“Is this suitable for sensitive skin?” is rarely about sensitive skin. It is someone saying: I have been burned before and I need you to tell me you have thought about people like me. A one-word yes closes the thread. A sentence that names the worry — what is in it, what is not, what to do if it still stings — closes the sale.
The same applies to the sceptical comment, the one you are tempted to hide. Answered generously and in public, it is the most persuasive thing on the whole post, because it is the only part the reader is certain you did not write for yourself.
Twenty minutes, twice a day
Not all day. Two windows, both inside the first twelve hours of a post going out, which is when the questions arrive and when the platform is still deciding who else deserves to see it.
Two habits make those forty minutes worth more than an extra post: reply in full sentences, and answer as the person who made the thing rather than as the account. Nobody has ever been persuaded by a brand voice in a comment thread. They have been persuaded by someone who clearly knows the product well enough to tell them when it is not right for them.
Keep the questions. Every fortnight, read back through them and count what repeats. Three repeats is a post. Five is a page on the website. The comments are not admin — they are the cheapest audience research you will ever be handed, and most brands delete it by answering in emoji.
Two things to avoid, both popular. The automated DM that fires the second someone comments spends, in one message, the goodwill the post just earned — everyone recognises it, and what it says is we wanted your engagement, not your question. And the canned reply pasted under forty comments in a row tells the fortieth person exactly how much thought the first thirty-nine received.
None of this scales, which is the point. A founder-led brand has one genuine advantage over a bigger competitor with a bigger budget, and it is that the person who made the thing can answer for it in public, today, in their own words.