TLDR: Sort every comment into one of four buckets (lead, support, praise, spam) and give each bucket one owner and one action. Trigger words handle the repeatable ones. A person handles the rest. Set it up in about an hour.
A comment like "how much is this?" is a lead. It sits under a post for three days, with 40 emoji reactions above it, and nobody sees it.
Routing means the comment finds its owner without anyone scrolling. If you want the sales side in depth, read how to turn customer comments into leads without manual tracking. This post is about the routing rules themselves.
The four buckets and who owns each
| Bucket | Example | Owner | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead | "Price?" "Do you ship to Canada?" | Sales or the founder | Reply in public, move to DM |
| Support | "My order has not arrived" | Support | Reply, then take it private |
| Praise | "Love this!" | Community manager | Like, short thank-you |
| Spam | Links, bots, scams | Nobody | Hide or delete |
Put this table in your team doc. It is the whole policy.
Rule 1: leads go first, always
If you only have time for one rule, sort leads to the top. A lead comment older than a day is worth less every hour.
Pick your lead words: price, cost, link, how much, available, buy, book. Ten words catch most of them. Add words your own customers use.
Rule 2: use trigger words for the repeatable questions
For common questions, automate the first reply. In Mydrop, trigger words fire when a comment contains a chosen word. The automation can reply to the comment and send the person the details in a DM.
Keep the automated reply short and honest. It should say what you are sending and when a person will follow up.
Rule 3: one inbox, one owner per shift
Without a single inbox, comments are in four apps and each looks like someone else's job. Pull Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the rest into one social inbox and name who watches it each day.
If your team covers several timezones, name the owner per zone too. Our review of social inbox triage tools lists what to look for in a tool.
Rule 4: hide spam before it trains your audience
Unanswered spam makes a page look abandoned. Set a keyword list for the usual patterns (links, "DM me to earn", crypto) and hide on match. Check the hidden list weekly, because a real customer can sometimes be caught by a rule.
What to measure after two weeks
Do not build a dashboard. Check three numbers:
- Lead comments found. How many bucket-one comments did you catch?
- Time to first reply. Pick ten leads and note the gap.
- Leads moved to DM. How many turned into a conversation?
If time to first reply is under a day, routing works. If it is not, the owner is the problem and the tool is not.
A sample week of routing
Say you post five times a week and get about 40 comments. Under this system, around four are leads, six are support questions, twenty are praise and ten are spam or noise.
You reply to the four leads the same day, forward the six support notes to the person who can fix them, thank praise in one batch and let spam rules clear the rest. That is roughly 20 minutes of daily work in place of an hour of scrolling.
The numbers are an illustration, not a benchmark. Your own mix will differ, and the first two weeks of counting will show you what it is.
Keep a human in the loop for the sensitive ones
Do not automate replies to angry or legal comments. Flag them with keywords such as refund, lawyer and scam, and send them straight to a named person. A fast, calm human answer to one upset customer protects more revenue than a hundred automated thank-yous.
Review the flagged list weekly and adjust the words.
Set it up this afternoon
- Copy the four-bucket table into your team doc.
- Choose ten lead words and five spam words.
- Create two trigger-word automations: one for price, one for link.
- Name the daily owner.
Create a free Mydrop account and connect your first inbox to test it on this week's posts.
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