Managing a multi-purpose inbox for all of your social channels is hard enough. With a unified social feed consisting of customer service inquiries, Retweets, @mentions, ad comments, complaints, praise—the list goes on—it’s becoming even more of a challenge. This is especially true when considering the growing engagement rates between brands and customers.

It’s clear that the modern social inbox requires a team of social marketing experts and customer support specialists, delegating and prioritizing messages to respond in a timely manner. To keep up, you need more efficient ways to manage the Smart Inbox.

Today we are happy to announce Inbox Views: a new way for you and your team to customize your inbox in order to focus on the messages most relevant to you.

Inbox Views helps streamline your workflow to view only the messages that require your attention in the Smart Inbox. This means that the message types, networks or keywords that matter most will be available in a custom inbox experience, making it possible to easily prioritize across different tasks.

Optimize Your Workflow

Inbox Views enable you to build and save your own custom views using specific filter sets in the Smart Inbox. You can easily configure an Inbox View by selecting network profiles, messages types and brand keywords that you’d like to view. Then save and name the Inbox View for easy reference.

As a social media manager, you can create hyper-focused, personalized views by saving the filter sets you frequently use. Consider your biggest priority—whether it’s responding to incoming inquiries or finding customers expressing frustration without reaching out directly—and create dedicated Inbox Views to match.

Let’s say you track a Brand Keyword for “(help OR broken) AND (@yourbrandname)” in the Smart Inbox and you regularly find yourself checking that filter to ensure those messages get attention. Simply save the configuration and name it “Priority Inbox” and you’ll have a personalized inbox readily available to optimize your workflow.

Inbox Views

Organize & Prioritize Several Tasks

As a member of a growing social media team, you may be managing multiple tasks, so it’s important that you have the ability to quickly change gears. The beauty of Inbox Views is the efficiency and focus it unlocks while managing several priorities—without the added steps of selecting new filters as you switch between tasks.

To respond to messages more efficiently, you can set up several priority inboxes and label them: (e.g. “Support Issues”, “Prospects”, “Community – FB”). You can quickly see a real-time count of how many new messages are in each Inbox View and jump to the ones that need the most attention.

Once you’ve created your Inbox Views, seamlessly collaborate with specific team members or groups by sharing focused inboxes. Simply select specific people within your team, or even an entire group, to get access to that particular inbox. This leads to a clearer distribution of responsibilities across larger teams.

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Manage Multiple Products, Report on a Company Level

In addition to Sprout’s Groups, Inbox Views also serves as an effective tool to help businesses manage social accounts for multiple product lines. And while Groups allow you the organization and customization you need at the brand and account level, Inbox Views let you get even more granular by creating and assigning unique views within that account based on specific profiles, message types and keywords.

For example, a Social Media Manager at a CPG company saves filter sets associated with different product lines: “Kitchenware”, “Diapers”, etc and then shares Inbox Views with the respective team members. This way, each team can easily manage their products in a focused Smart Inbox, while still getting all the benefits of collaboration across various product lines.

More importantly, managers will able to track performance and growth company-wide– getting a holistic view of reporting across all products.

Stay tuned for more updates to Sprout’s Smart Inbox and please share your feedback!