Application usage by selecting targeted responses to social media posts about the application

The disclosed embodiments provide a system that improves usage of an application. During operation, the system identifies, in a set of social media posts, a question related to use of the application. Next, the system responds to the set of social media posts with a set of answers to the question on one or more social media platforms and tracks social media responses to the set of answers. The system then calculates a set of relevance scores for the answers based on the tracked social media responses, wherein each relevance score represents a relevance of one of the answers to the question. Upon identifying the question in a subsequent social media post, the system selects an answer from the set of answers based on a relevance score of the answer and posts the answer in response to the subsequent social media post.