Replying To Comments Does More For Your Engagement Than Posting More, Buffer Finds

Buffer trawled through fifty-two million posts in 2026 and found that accounts which bother to reply to their own comments get noticeably more engagement than accounts which don't. This includes practices like yours, assuming anyone's actually running your Instagram.

Page updated: 13 Aug 2026

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Practices posting into the void and never answering a single comment are giving away free engagement they could have had for the price of a reply.

Original Research	Buffer's dig through more than fifty million posts across ten platforms, to work out what actually moves the needle on engagement in 2026.
Source	https://buffer.com/resources/state-of-social-media-engagement-2026/
Overview	Buffer, a social media scheduling company, analysed reply behaviour and engagement rates across platforms and published the results as a benchmark report.
Year	2026
Publisher	Brand, Buffer
Relevance to Wellbeing	Any practice with a social account can act on this immediately, since replying to comments costs nothing but time and shows measurable gains on platforms like Threads and LinkedIn.
Our Verdict	Too early to tell the data looks solid, but this is a platform tactic, not proof it brings in new clients.
Our Summary	Fifty-two million posts is a proper sample, not a survey of forty people who like Buffer's newsletter. Replying costs nothing except the minutes it takes, which suits a solo practitioner with no marketing budget. More engagement on a post is not the same as more bookings, and Buffer doesn't claim otherwise. The gains vary wildly by platform, so a therapist mostly on Facebook gets a fraction of what a coach on Threads might.
Our Geo View	Applies broadly to all countries

Abstract of wellbeing niches and revenue flow

Recognise how this might impact your practice

Why this might matter to you

Coaching: this matters because a coach who answers every comment on a client win post looks like someone who's actually there, not just scheduling posts and going quiet.
Therapy: this matters because a therapist can't offer advice in the comments, but a warm "thanks for reading" still counts as replying, and it still works.
Training: this matters because a trainer posting workout clips gets more mileage from ten replies to "how do I start" than from filming another clip.
Alternative Healing: this matters because sceptical comments need answering too, and ignoring them looks worse than a slightly clumsy reply.
Clinical: this matters because a clinic account that never responds looks unstaffed, which is not the impression you want before someone books a consultation.
Retreat/Centre: this matters because a centre fielding "is this suitable for beginners" in the comments and never answering is losing bookings to its own silence.

Where this came from

Buffer went through over fifty million posts on ten platforms and found accounts that reply to comments consistently outperform accounts that don't, by a margin ranging from modest to substantial depending on the platform.

Buffer, State of Social Media Engagement report, 2026. Published directly by Buffer, not paywalled.

Credibility flags: large disclosed dataset (52 million posts, 10 platforms), methodology described in the report, publisher is a social media tool company with a commercial interest in engagement being fixable.

How we scored this

A relevance score out of 100, built from three things: how well it fits the six practice types, how recent it is, and how solid the methodology behind it is.

63%

Practice fit, 25How new, 100How solid, 75

Marked down slightly for being brand-published rather than independently peer-reviewed, but the practice fit is loose since this is general social media behaviour rather than wellbeing-specific, and the method confidence stays fairly high given the scale of the sample and disclosed approach.

It's worth considering changes to your marketing practices

What this means for your marketing

Put fifteen minutes a day on the calendar just for replying to comments, before you write anything new.
Brief your team, if you have one, that "posted it" doesn't count as done until someone's answered the comments.
Say thank you or something equally small on every comment, even the ones that don't need a real answer.
Check which platform you're actually active on and prioritise replies there first, since the gains aren't even across platforms.
Stop measuring success by post count and start checking whether anyone got a reply this week.

Who this is most useful for

Practice type	Relevance	Recommended action
Coaching	High	Reply to every comment on client-result posts within a day.
Therapy	Medium	Reply briefly and warmly, keeping clinical distance where needed.
Training	High	Answer form and technique questions directly in the comments.
Alternative Healing	Medium	Respond calmly to sceptical comments rather than ignoring them.
Clinical	Medium	Reply to booking and eligibility questions promptly and visibly.
Retreat/Centre	High	Answer suitability and logistics questions in the comments, not just DMs.

Best before

Best before: revisit when Buffer publishes its next annual State of Social Media report, expected in 2027.

Well. Here We Are At The Bottom.

The best practitioners always find their way here. We have a story garden, a listening wind and a visual river waiting to make sense of themselves - they do, beautifully, in a twenty-five-minute conversation over a good coffee. How do you take it?

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