How many comments do businesses answer on Instagram and Facebook?

What we found.

• 15% of public comments got an answer in the thread
• 122 of 178 businesses answered none of the comments we read
• 12% vs 22% answered on Instagram, against Facebook
• 29% of unanswered comments were someone asking to buy, asking a question or complaining
• 53% of unanswered comments arrived outside 9am to 6pm, local time
• 2 hours 42 minutes typical wait when a page did answer

By industry. Agencies answer least.

54 of the 62 marketing and advertising agencies we read answered none of the comments on their own posts.

By country and channel.

What to do about it. Five steps for this week.

1. 1

   Count your own answer rate (10 minutes)

   Open the last 5 posts on each page you run. For each comment, note whether the page replied in the thread. Divide replies by comments. Compare it with the 15% in this study, 12% on Instagram and 22% on Facebook. Do it for each client page if you are an agency.

2. 2

   Answer buying questions first

   Sort unanswered comments into four piles: wants to buy (price, stock, "how do I order"), a question, a complaint, everything else. In this study 14% of unanswered comments were buying questions, 9% other questions and 5% complaints. Clear the first three every day.

3. 3

   Reply in public, then take details to a message

   A public reply shows everyone reading the post that the page answers. Keep prices, order numbers and personal details for a private message, and say in the thread that you sent one.

4. 4

   Set an answer target and cover the evening

   53% of the unanswered comments here arrived outside office hours. Pick a target you can keep (for example, within one hour from 9 to 6, and by 10am for anything that came in overnight), then decide who covers the evening: a rota, a scheduled check, or automation.

5. 5

   Put the number in the monthly report

   Agencies: add "comments answered" and "median time to answer" for each client page to the monthly report. It is the number a client feels when a customer complains that nobody replied.

Replies to copy

Price or stock question:
"Thanks [name]! We've just sent you the details in a message."

Question we can answer in public:
"Good question, [name]: [one-sentence answer]. Anything else, send us a message."

Complaint:
"Sorry about this, [name]. We've sent you a message so we can sort it out today."

Maxbound answers Instagram and Facebook comments and DMs with an AI agent trained on each business, and can hold every reply for a person to approve. See how it works.

How we measured. And what it cannot tell you.

• Who: 178 businesses from Maxbound's prospect lists, mostly in Jordan (115), Syria (37), United Arab Emirates (15). Most are agencies and small businesses. It is not a random sample of all businesses.
• What: the public comments on each page's most recent Instagram and Facebook posts (362 posts), read once between 2026-08-10 and 2026-09-02.
• Answered means a reply in the comment thread from the business's own account. A reply sent only by private message is invisible from outside, so the answered share is a floor, not a ceiling.
• A business is counted only when at least 5 of its comments were sampled; an industry or country is shown only with at least 10 businesses, the rest under Other.
• Reply time: for each page, the median wait of the replies we could time (71 pages). 18 pages answered within 10 seconds, almost certainly automated; 17 took more than a day.
• What the unanswered comments asked: each one read by a language model and filed as buying, question, complaint or other (637 labelled).
• Local time: placed on the business's own clock only for countries with one fixed time offset all year.
• Comments a business deleted or hid before we read the page are not counted.