Your Instagram's most useful output right now is probably the comment sections and the DMs. Reach is the visible number. Comments and DMs are buyers describing their scenario in public, for free, and most brands are throwing them away.
Source: The tactic is from Oren John's 2026-01-08 video "How to get ahead of 99% of brands in 2026 (content playbook)". The Elf example and the roofing anecdote are his. The two editorial layers on top, reply by hand as long as possible, and content shape tunes which DMs you get, are ours.
Most brands read comments as engagement, not as data
Community management as a discipline came out of the reach era, when a brand's job on social was to be visible and likeable. Reply to the fans, don't ignore anyone, keep the account alive. That's a fine goal if the primary output of the channel is impressions. It's a bad goal if the primary output is buyers.
Because if the goal is buyers, every comment is a small piece of qualifying data. Someone mentions their industry, that's an industry filter. Someone mentions their skin type, their location, the product they're using, the thing they're launching, that's a buying signal in plain view. The account behaves like a lead-gen form the person filled out voluntarily, and most brands react to it by sending a heart emoji.
Elf runs comments like a shop assistant
Elf Cosmetics is the public example worth studying. Their team works with Viral Nation on the comment side, and the pattern is consistent: someone mentions their skin type, they get a specific product pairing; someone asks about a shade, they get a recommendation and a follow-up question. It reads like the way a shop assistant behaves on a slow afternoon, taking the shopper's actual scenario, matching product to it, and keeping the conversation open long enough to make a sale.
The unglamorous version, from a services brand
Oren John shared a services-side version on the same 2026 content roundup that's easier to steal. A roofing brand he works with in the Midwest had 34 comments on one video. He walked through them and found people naming their state, naming the product they were using, naming the fact that they needed a quote. Nobody at the roofing brand had spent the fifteen minutes it would have taken to DM the ones who lived in the state they served.
His line on it: if you're an agency or a services business and you're not doing this, you're foolish. Coming from someone who runs media for services brands full time, that lands harder than the standard "engage with your audience" advice.
Reply by hand for as long as you possibly can
The instinct as soon as the volume gets uncomfortable is to hand it off. First to a VA, then to a chatbot, then to some agentic reply setup that pulls context from a spreadsheet. Every one of those steps degrades the reply, and the person on the other end can usually feel the difference in the first sentence. Once you read as a scroll ad, they stop sending the useful DMs.
We delegate this to a VA when it's genuinely costing hours out of the day, and automate with a bot or a GPT when it's genuinely costing a few team members hours a week. Not before. This channel stays low-volume for long enough that the human quality is worth protecting, and the moment it stops feeling human is the moment the reader stops writing the useful comment in the first place.
That's a slower ramp than most operators want. The whole reason the channel works is that it doesn't feel like the automated part of a marketing stack, and delaying the handoff is the thing that keeps that true.
The content you make shapes the DMs you get
The tactic runs in the other direction too, which is where it gets useful for the creative side of the operation.
Content shape decides which DMs arrive. Broad, jokey, generic videos pull broad, jokey, generic comments, which then generate broad, jokey, generic DMs. That's a lot of engagement for very little buying signal. Videos that speak to a specific buyer scenario (the exact problem, the exact use case, the exact vertical) pull DMs where the person is already telling you what they need.
The reply work and the shoot work compound each other. Once you spend a week actually reading the comment sections, you can point at the two or three videos that pulled useful DMs and shoot more of that shape next week. You stop guessing at what "resonates" and start reading it directly off the responses.
How to run this on your account this week
- Pull the last 30 comments on your best-performing posts and reply by hand. A specific recommendation or a specific follow-up question, not an emoji.
- Where the commenter named their scenario (industry, location, product they use, thing they're launching), DM them within 24 hours with a specific answer or a pairing. Still by hand.
- After the batch, mark which posts pulled useful comments and which pulled noise. Shape next week's shoots toward the ones that pulled useful.
The whole thing takes an hour on a slow Friday afternoon, and it will surface leads your paid channels are trying to buy for you.
The channel almost every brand underspends on
Most brands staff a shooter, staff an editor, sometimes staff a strategist, and then leave the comment section to whoever's holding the phone when a notification comes in. That's the shape of the operation you'd design if you thought the whole point of Instagram was reach.
The comment section is a sales channel that runs 24/7 and costs nothing to operate. Almost nobody staffs it.
