A social media inbox is an essential tool for any social media manager. Without one, social interactions are disconnected between platforms. They lack the context of your ongoing relationship with each client and prospect.
Conversely, a unified social inbox allows for seamless collaboration between social teams. Customer history and qualifications are always at your fingertips. Life becomes easier for both your customers and your team.
Learn more about how using a central social inbox can help your team save time and work smarter, not harder.
Social inbox is a tool that allows you to manage public and private messages from all popular social media platforms in one place. It includes customer service and engagement features that make it easy for a social team to work together.
Using a social inbox is the best way to respond accurately and timely to followers, customers and prospects. It can help marketing and customer service teams, small business owners, and stand-alone social media managers save time and keep track of messages from multiple social media accounts.
A good social media inbox includes automation, monitoring and reporting features. It is a real customer service platform rather than a simple social media message management system.
A unified social media inbox helps you manage social media with less stress and improves your brand’s reputation by making it easier for customers to interact with your brand online, but it’s not all it can do for your team.
1. Save time and simplify message processing
It integrates social media inbox management tools, automation and smart routing features. They send messages to the right member of your team without any supervisor intervention. Language detection is an especially important component if you operate in multiple regions.
Your social media inbox should also include a search function. This allows you to search for all public and private comments in your incoming channels, so you can find similar questions from the past, review old conversations, and spot trends. Search is especially useful for content moderators.
What to consider when choosing a social media inbox:
- Ability to review message queues
- Ability to assign and tag incoming messages both manually and automatically
- Message status reviews and filtering
- Interaction search and filtering
2. Keep response times low
Response time is an important metric for social customer service teams. And for good reason. While 79% of consumers expect a response from social media within 24 hours, 40% expect a response within just one hour.
Assuming you set reasonable goals, your team may be doing a great job meeting expectations during business hours, when everything is going well.
But social posts and comments don’t always come at a predictable pace or at predictable times. When message volume spikes without warning, an all-in-one social inbox helps prioritize and organize messages to keep response times low and ensure no action items are missed.
Managing all your messages from a single control panel also significantly reduces the time lost checking multiple DM inboxes on social networks.
What to consider when choosing a social media inbox:
- Single sign-on for all social messaging
- Hours of operation indicators and automatic after-hours responses
- Message automations and autoresponders
- Intelligent chatbot and virtual agent features
- Response time reporting and analysis
- Message volume reporting
- supervisor board
3. Work better as a team
A social inbox provides a complete record of who said what to whom and when, regardless of which channel the conversation started and whether it went from public to private or vice versa.
This gives your team the full context of any conversation so you can avoid duplicate conversations across multiple platforms while providing the most detailed response possible.
What to consider when choosing a social inbox:
- View and reply to posts on all your social profiles
- Suggested replies and tags
- Record of both dark and organic comments
- Separate agent and supervisor views
- Automatic prevention of duplicate replies by multiple team members
- Ability for customer service supervisors to view conversations, topics and CSAT in real time
4. Never miss an important interaction
A social media inbox lets you manage public and private interactions in one place, so you won’t miss any interaction. You can also set up keyword tracking so you can see people talking about your brand even if you’re not tagged.
Better still, when you integrate your social inbox with your CRM, you have all the data about every customer you interact with at your fingertips, every time you communicate. Data flows from your CRM to your social inbox and vice versa, so every record is up-to-date and you know where each contact is in the buying process.
What to consider when choosing a social media inbox:
- The ability to access and respond to private, direct and public messages, as well as mentions and reactions across platforms
- Keyword search flows and monitoring
- Integrations with tools like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics
5. Manage crises with ease
When crises strike, it’s important to have an accurate picture of what’s going on across all of your social messaging channels. A social inbox makes it easy to get the full picture of what’s going on so you can report on the stakeholder chain and ensure managers have the information they need to make quick decisions.
After identifying the appropriate response, a social inbox helps ensure that anyone involved with your brand receives a timely and appropriate response that aligns with the brand message to address the crisis.
What to consider when choosing a social media inbox:
- Ability to prioritize incoming messages for priority response
- Ability to monitor comments and interaction across platforms
- Ability to create automatic replies on the fly
- SLA alerts
6. Measure customer satisfaction
A social inbox with preloaded customer satisfaction surveys and analytics gives you tremendous insight into how your customers feel about your brand and team. Instead of analyzing sentiment and satisfaction on each platform, you get a picture of customer satisfaction with your cross-platform social response.
What to consider when choosing a social media inbox:
- Full CSAT reports and analysis
- Ability to monitor CSAT in real time
- Ability to filter CSAT reports for maximum reporting insight
7. Gather customer information
When used as a social listening tool, a social inbox helps you better understand who engages with your brand on social media.
Do you get comments and mentions from existing customers? Hopes? How do the questions people ask about your products and services differ before and after purchase?
The information you gain can help you develop audience personalities, better define your target market, and create more effective FAQs and product documentation.
What to consider when choosing a social media inbox:
- Two-way communication and data flow with your CRM
- Search and filtering functions
- Ability to add notes and attributes to client files and social conversations
8. Provide better customer service
A social inbox enables your team to provide the best customer service, engagement and outreach. Automatic message forwarding reduces the time it takes for each message to get into the hands of the most qualified team member.
Meanwhile, smart chatbots decode a significant portion of customer messages without your team being involved. In Moyens I/O’s Social Trends 2023 Survey, only 26% of organizations that use social media as their primary customer service channel said they use chatbots. Making the most of AI now is a great way to stay ahead of the herd.
What to consider when choosing a social media inbox:
- Message forwarding to the correct team member
- Customer satisfaction surveys
- Chatbot conversations (using AI for best results)
How to use Moyens I/O Inbox?
Moyens I/O Inbox helps bridge the gap between social media and customer service. Here’s how to start your day with Moyens I/O Inbox to clear your message queue before lunch.
Did you find the video easier to follow? We got you:
1. Open the agent workspace to conversation view
This shows you the entire history of an individual’s interactions with your brand. You’ll also see contact information from your CRM, which you can edit or add as you interact with the customer. Everything you add flows back into the CRM so your sales team is always up to date. Be sure to check the notes for any additional information that will help you customize your social replies.
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2. Search previous conversations
Use the search function to search all messages by keyword or customer. This is a great way to save time and increase consistency when dealing with similar conversations. A quick search can also help you understand how customers and potential customers feel about a particular topic.
3. Review your message queue
Your message queue provides a list of each conversation, including which social media channel it came from, when it was sent, and who it’s currently assigned to. You can see all messages sorted by status: new pending or resolved and search or filter the chat to make sure you focus on the most relevant.
4. Manage assignments
Moyens I/O Inbox uses smart forwarding features and language detection to automatically assign messages to the right team member. If you prefer to automatically assign a message or want to change an assignment, you can do so with just a few clicks. Forward messages to billing, sales or other relevant departments to get the fastest and most accurate response to your customer.
5. Install automations
Set up automated CSAT surveys and SLA notifications within Moyens I/O Inbox. This is also where you can set up automatic replies and program your AI-powered chatbot.
6. Submit your responses
When it’s time to reply to a comment or message, you can write from scratch or choose to edit a saved reply to shorten your response time. Hit To enter click to send the reply, then solved to show that the message has been handled.
Double-check the queue to see if there are any new messages that need your attention. Otherwise, you’re done!
Save time building an efficient customer support system on social media with Moyens I/O. Respond to questions and complaints, create tickets from social chats and work with chatbots, all from a single dashboard. See it in action.
