The expectation has shifted and many small businesses are working from an outdated one. People message businesses on social platforms in the same way they would email, expecting a reply within hours rather than days, and several platforms display a response rate or a typical response time publicly. That figure is visible to anybody considering contacting you, and a poor one discourages the contact before it happens.
Treat messages as enquiries rather than as social activity, which means routing them somewhere you actually see. Platform notifications are easy to miss among everything else those applications generate, and a business that checks the account weekly is effectively unreachable through it. If you cannot monitor it, turning off messaging is more honest than leaving it open.
Comments are different from messages and deserve a different standard. A reply to a comment is public and read by everybody who encounters the post, which makes it worth doing and worth doing briefly. Two sentences acknowledging something specific outperforms a longer response, and replying to most comments rather than all of them is acceptable in a way that ignoring messages is not.
Prioritise anything that looks like a question, a complaint, or a purchase intent, and respond to those first. Somebody asking whether you do a particular thing is a prospect. Somebody complaining is a reputational matter. General positive comments deserve acknowledgement and can wait, which is the correct ordering when time is limited.
Move anything substantive off the platform quickly. A message that becomes a genuine enquiry should continue by email or phone, both because those produce a record and because platform messaging is a poor place to discuss detail. Say so plainly and offer the route rather than continuing indefinitely in a channel neither party can search.
Set expectations in the profile itself where the platform allows it. A line stating that messages are answered during business hours and anything urgent should come by phone converts an implied promise of immediacy into a known interval, and it costs one field.
Be careful about automated replies, which help and can also make things worse. An acknowledgement stating when somebody will hear back is useful. A chatbot that attempts to answer and fails is a barrier at the moment somebody was willing to engage, and it is more irritating on a messaging platform than on a website because the person expected a human.
Then check what is actually arriving, because the volume is usually small and the assumption that it is unmanageable is frequently wrong. Most small business accounts receive a handful of messages a month, which is fifteen minutes of attention, and the businesses treating it as an unmanageable burden are usually reacting to notification volume rather than to genuine correspondence.
Decide in advance what you do about the ones that require a considered answer, because those are what create the delay. A short acknowledgement saying you will reply properly, sent within the hour, holds the conversation while you find the time, and it is considerably better than composing the full response two days later.
Turn off messaging entirely if you genuinely cannot monitor it, since most platforms allow this and an unavailable channel is more honest than an unanswered one. Directing people to a phone number or an email you do check is better service than leaving a route open that nobody watches.