The 'Are You Open?' Post That Saves You Repeating Yourself
Every repeated DM asking if you're open is a customer who nearly walked away without asking at all. One clear, pinned post can answer the question for good, freeing you from typing the same reply for the fortieth time.
Dave Smith
# The 'Are You Open?' Post: Ending Repetitive Customer Questions for Good
Check your Facebook messages right now. Go on. Somewhere in there, probably within the last week, someone has asked you a question you've answered a hundred times before. Are you open bank holiday Monday? Do you take card? Is there parking nearby? Can you fit me in this week?
None of these questions are unreasonable. They're exactly what a potential customer needs to know before they turn up, ring, or book. The problem isn't the question. It's that you're answering it one exhausted DM reply at a time, while the exact same information sits unposted, invisible, three scrolls deep in nobody's memory.
Why This Keeps Happening
Most SMEs treat their social media as a broadcast channel and their inbox as a completely separate customer service desk. You post the pretty stuff — the finished cake, the completed job, the new stock arriving — and you field the practical questions privately, individually, forever.
But here's the thing: if one person's asked whether you're open on a Sunday, dozens more have wondered the same thing and just... left. They didn't message. They checked your page, couldn't find an answer in ten seconds, and quietly went to a competitor who'd bothered to say. The DMs you do get are only the tip of it — for every person who asks, there's a queue of people who didn't.
That's not a customer service problem. That's a content problem, and it's one you can actually fix with the least glamorous, most useful post type going: the answer, published where the question keeps coming from.
What Actually Works
The fix isn't complicated, but it does need a shift in how you think about "content." Not everything you post has to sell something or show off a finished job. Some of the highest-value posts you'll ever publish are the ones that simply remove friction — they answer the question before it's asked, so the customer who was on the fence about messaging you just... books instead.
Look at your last month of DMs and comments. Not the compliments, not the chit-chat — the practical, logistical, "can I actually use this business" questions. Opening hours around holidays. Whether you deliver, and how far. Whether you need a deposit. Whether walk-ins are welcome or it's booking only. Whether the thing they saw six months ago is still available. That list, unglamorous as it looks, is a ready-made content plan that nobody else is going to write for you, because nobody else has your inbox.
How to Implement It
Start by mining what you've already got. Scroll back through your last few weeks of messages and comments and jot down every repeated question — you'll likely spot the same four or five coming up again and again. Those are your priority posts.
Turn each one into a short, standalone post: the question as the hook, the answer as the payoff. "Yes, we're open bank holiday Monday, 9 till 4, same as usual" is a complete post. It doesn't need a clever caption or a moody photo. It needs to exist, clearly, somewhere a scrolling stranger will actually see it.
Then pin the most-asked one. Whichever platform you're on, there's a way to keep a post at the top of your page — use it. Whoever lands on your profile from a Google search or a tagged photo should see the answer to your most common question before they see anything else.
Finally, treat this as ongoing, not a one-off tidy-up. Every time a new question lands in your DMs that you've never answered publicly before, that's your cue for the next post. Bank holiday hours change. Prices change. Booking systems change. The FAQ post you wrote in January might be wrong by July — keep it current, and keep adding to it.
It's worth splitting these into two piles, too. Some answers are evergreen — do you take card, is there parking, do you offer a warranty — and can live as a permanent pinned post or a highlight you barely touch again. Others are seasonal or time-limited — Christmas opening hours, a temporary closure for refurbishment, a waiting list that's currently full — and need posting fresh each time, then quietly taken down once they're out of date. Mixing the two up is how accounts end up with a pinned post from eighteen months ago cheerfully advertising "closed for Easter weekend" in the middle of October.
This is exactly the kind of content that's easy to deprioritise because it doesn't feel exciting to write, and exactly the kind that quietly protects revenue while your flashier posts get the likes. It's also, handily, one of the content types Aunty Social generates for you automatically — feed it what people actually ask, and it'll turn that into ready-to-post answers instead of you retyping the same reply for the fortieth time.
The Upshot
Every unanswered "are you open?" is a small, silent no. The business that bothers to answer in public — clearly, visibly, before anyone has to ask — is the one that gets the booking instead of the scroll-past. It's not the most creative content you'll ever post. It might just be the most profitable.