Why we answer comments before we post

The hour after a post goes up decides how far it travels. Platforms show a post to a few people first and watch what they do. A post with a conversation under it gets shown to more people; a post with ten unanswered questions is quietly dropped.

The first hour

So we schedule our own time before we schedule the post. For the first hour after anything goes live, someone on our team is in the comments. Every question gets an answer, every compliment gets a reply, and anything we can't answer goes to the owner by text.

It sounds small. On the accounts we run, replying inside the first hour roughly doubles how many people a post reaches, compared with the same kind of post answered the next morning.

What it changes

The comments start to read like a conversation at the counter. People ask about opening times, allergies and sizes because they expect an answer. That is when a feed starts selling things.