Facebook Debuts Unified Inbox for Facebook, Messenger and Instagram

Facebook has finally launched a unified inbox for Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, making it easier for businesses to manage conversations across the three platforms (via TechCrunch). “The new feature is one of our most frequent requests”, said Benji Shomair, Facebook’s global head of Pages. “There were some people even carrying multiple phones so that they can quickly respond to all the different things coming in”, he added.

Previously, if a businesses wanted to respond to customers on Facebook and Instagram, they had to open separate apps — an increasing challenge as more and more of their communication is happening ons social media. Facebook says Pages alone are seeing “nearly 5 billion comments, messages and visitor posts” each month. Now those businesses can respond to all of those comments from Facebook’s Pages Manager app.

The new feature lets businesses respond to all the comments from the updated Pages app. The inbox in the app will now include a unified stream of all that commentary, including comments on their Facebook posts, posts on their Page, messages and comments on their Instagram and videos, as well as individual tabs for focusing on individual channels.

The social networking giant has been beta testing the feature with select users, and will be rolling it out to more businesses over the next few weeks.