Overview of Hootsuite Inbox

Hootsuite Inbox helps you manage social messages from customers and audiences by collecting private and public messages from all networks in one place. Message threads give you the full context of conversations, so you can respond efficiently while focusing on building relationships.

Plans: This feature is not available to Hootsuite Pro plan members. To change your plan type, see Manage your Hootsuite plan and account.

The information in this article applies to:

• Facebook Page private messages
• Comments and replies on your public Facebook Page posts and ads
• Visitor posts to your Facebook Page, their comments, and replies
• Twitter direct messages and mentions
• Comments and replies on your LinkedIn Page and Showcase Page posts
• Instagram public comments and replies, direct messages, and story mentions

For step-by-step instructions for using Inbox, see Engage with and assign conversations in Inbox.

Initial setup

As soon as you connect social accounts to Hootsuite, you will start seeing new messages, comments, and mentions in Inbox. You will not see any messages sent before your accounts were connected to Hootsuite.

To make sure that Facebook Page messages, Instagram comments, messages, and mentions, and LinkedIn comments appear in Inbox, you might need to reconnect those accounts as an account admin. You may also need to turn on message access for Instagram. For more information, see Reconnect a social account.

Twitter messages appear in Inbox right away.

Engage in conversations

Select any message in Inbox to reply to comments in a thread, tag a user with an @mention, or respond to a user with a private message. You can dismiss messages that require no action.

Assignments and filters

Inbox assignments and filters can help you collaborate more easily between teams.

• Filters allow you to sort Inbox content by assignment, social network, message type, and date.
• When a message or comment should be handled by someone else, you can assign the message directly to a team member. The message appears in their Assigned to Me list, and they receive an email notification. You can also assign conversations to yourself.

Notifications

New Inbox activity triggers a visual notification (a red dot ) that you can see while working in other areas of Hootsuite. The red dot appears whenever there is a new or resolved thread or a reply to an unassigned thread. Replies to assigned threads create notifications only for the assigned user or team.

Inbox notifications are enabled by default for all users who have permissions for the associated profile. To turn them off, select Settings, clear the check box, and then select Save.

Storage and limits

Conversations stay in Inbox for 6 weeks. Exception: LinkedIn conversations are removed after 2 weeks of inactivity on a thread.

Facebook private messages that are deleted in the Facebook app still appear in your Hootsuite Inbox for 6 weeks. All Facebook private messages older than 6 weeks are removed from Inbox, but you can still view them in Streams.

Twitter messages are encrypted and temporarily stored for up to 6 weeks.

For optimal Inbox performance, each social profile in a Hootsuite account is limited to 10,000 public conversations and 10,000 private conversations. When that limit is reached, the oldest conversation is removed from Inbox.

Permissions

Inbox is available to all members who have permissions to reply to your social accounts. Approvals are not currently supported, so members with Limited permissions cannot reply to Inbox messages. Members with Responder permissions can view and respond to public messages. If a member of your organization has custom social network permissions, "View Private Stream" is required to see Inbox messages, and "Publish Message" and "Comment and Reply" are required to reply.

Inbox for mobile

You can use Inbox in the Hootsuite mobile app to monitor messages on the go. All the same functionality is available, except for the ability to add tags to a message. Inbox activity syncs between the web version and the mobile apps.

To view your mobile Inbox, select the Inbox icon .

To learn more about Inbox for mobile, see Overview of the Hootsuite mobile app.