Have you ever found yourself tirelessly jumping between social media accounts? Or experienced the dumpster fire that is managing social using “streams”?
I feel your pain. That was where I used to be. Wasting hours needlessly. Week in week out. 😮💨
But that all changed when I started using a social media management tool with a unified social media inbox.
I saved myself over 2 hours each week just by ditching social streams.
And for those of you who are social media managers that manage more accounts; you'll save even more time.
The best part? I stopped missing important messages whenever I took a break from social media. Managing spam comment/DM spam became a whole lot easier too.
In this post, I'm going to walk you through the basics of how social media inboxes work and share the best social media tools that include a unified inbox. This list was compiled based on personal experience. So, yes, I have actually used these tools. Some of them I've used for years!
Short on time? Here are my top picks.
What is a unified social media inbox? And why do you need one?
A unified social media inbox pulls all of the mentions, retweets, and messages from all of your social platforms into a single inbox.
This means you don't have to log into countless social media accounts and check them individually.
And you don't have to deal with the complete and utter confusion of social streams like this:
Social streams get especially confusing because there's no easy way to see exactly who you have replied to. This problem was compounded significantly when I would go from checking via mobile, then switching to the desktop version of TweetDeck. I'd spend ages just trying to remember where I got upto last time.
Don't get me wrong, social streams can be useful but they're terrible for productivity.
With a unified social media inbox, you don't get any of those problems. It makes social media management so easy.
And with most tools of this type, I can flick between all of my social media accounts.
For each account, I can see all of the social messages that I haven't checked/responded to. I just work my way through the list, review those messages and archive them.
If there's something I need to action, clicking on it will bring up the conversation history on the right, along with details on that person.
From there, I can reply, like the message or assign it to a member of my team.
The option to mark these messages as reviewed and archive them is important as well. This is a key feature for this type of tool.
Now, let's take a look at the best social media tools that include a unified inbox:
The best social media inbox tools compared
Most of these tools are “all-in-one” social media tools.
This means they will give you a social media inbox along with other important features like post scheduling, and analytics/reporting.
The great thing about this is that you can centralise the majority of your social media marketing efforts into a single tool.
Let's take a closer look at each one:
#1 – Agorapulse
Agorapulse, in my opinion, has the best social media inbox of any tool on this list. It also covers off a lot of other all-in-one social media functionality such as publishing & reporting.
This social inbox is a work of art. They've really got the details right which is why it was the tool I chose after testing everything else.
First of all, it organizes your social accounts by brand so you only have to work through the accounts you need to at the time. Comments, @mentions, RTs, and DM's are pulled in from popular social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
And you can even reply to comments on your FB/IG ads as well.
Agorapulse allows you to work through all your messages and review them as you go. You can reply, RT, like or assign a task to a team member.
One particularly neat feature is that when viewing a social message, you don't just see that social message, you see the conversation thread that goes along with it. No more digging around.
There's an automated inbox assistant that can help clear up your inbox by creating rules. And collision detection is a great feature that ensures no overlapping messages from team members.
Other time saving features are built-in. For example, you can ban Facebook users from within the app without having to visit Facebook directly. Great for dealing with spammers.
A mobile app allows you to manage your social inbox on the go. And saved replies can help you save a lot of time.
Aside from the fantastic social inbox, you'll find a robust social scheduling tool that supports direct Instagram scheduling, social media listening, and powerful reporting & analytics functionality.
Price: Paid plans start from $49/month (billed annually). Try any paid plan free for 30 days.
Read our Agorapulse review.
#2 – Pallyy
Pallyy is another complete social media toolkit with some unique features for Instagram, such as a bio link tool. And it comes with one of the best social media inboxes that I've tested.
The UI for the inbox is similar to what you'll find in Gmail. It immediately feels familiar which makes it especially easy to use.
Other tools have a few more bells and whistles to their inbox, but I like the lightweight feel to Pallyy's inbox. It makes it easier to work through social messages.
You can still do all the important things like: add labels, assign team members, like & retweet, and reply to your social messages. And, most importantly, you can mark updates as reviewed and archive them.
But what's unique here is the social networks that Pallyy's inbox supports. Not only does it support the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It also supports Google Business reviews, and TikTok comments. Hardly any tools support these platforms in their inbox!
Aside from the unified social media inbox, you get access to social media profile analytics for a number of popular networks, a link in bio tool, and some Instagram-specific features.
The social media scheduling feature includes a calendar, grid view (for Instagram), and it is optimized for visual content sharing. Canva integration included. The workflow is slick.
Given Pallyy's price point, it is a great option for bloggers, content creators, and entrepreneurs. It has a lower entry price than most other tools on this list.
Team accounts and AI captions available as an add-on.
Price: $15/month per social group. A free trial is available. Annual discounts available.
Read our Pallyy review.
#3 – OneUp
OneUp is another popular all-in-one social media tool with a solid unified inbox, amongst other features.
OneUp takes a slightly different approach to the other social inbox tools I've listed above.
Instead of cramming DM's and comments into the same inbox, they're seperate. You can still do all of the important “productivity stuff” like marking posts as complete but the UI feels a little less chaotic to sift through.
The DM inbox feels like the UI of a social network. Just select the social media profile you want to check messages for, reply, and move to closed. Job done. You also have the option to move messages to spam. Nice and simple.
For the comment inbox, posts/comments are displayed differently to some other tools. Instead of each comment being viewed like its own message, you'll see the exact post the comment was left on and all the other comments on that post. You can then mark posts as complete and mark individual comments as complete.
This is a nice approach. At scale, especially if you've got posts with lots of comments, I feel this approach can be very efficient from a productivity standpoint.
One thing I particularly like is that you have the option to connect to Meta Ads and pull in your ad comments.
There's also a seperate UI to reply to Google reviews, should you need it.
I couldn't see much in the way of options to assign posts to team members but my OneUp account doesn't have teams enabled so that could be why.
Also, it's worth noting that Twitter/X isn't supported in their social inbox. This is understandable because Elon's wild API usage fees stopped this from being viable for tools to offer from a financial standpoint. For context; Meta and other platforms offer API access for free.
Anyway, OneUp is a very good tool. Plenty of features, well priced, and excellent support. There's also very little in the way of feature-gating so you'll be able to use their social inbox on the base plan.
Price: Plans start from $18/month. A free trial is available.
#4 – Sendible
Sendible is one of the best all-round social media tools on the market and it features a feature-rich unified inbox, as well as social streams.
If you find yourself needing to use a unified social media inbox but miss the real-time nature of social streams – Sendible is a great option.
The inbox is one of the best on the market. You can use it to manage comments & messages from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more.
There's a built-in approval workflow that makes it easy to share posts with your team. And you can filter by post type, and profiles. Archiving messages is easy but you can easily search through old messages if you archive something by mistake.
Then, if you need to go back to a real-time stream – you can do with the click of a button.
Outside of the inbox, you also get access to an extremely good social scheduling tool. You can upload posts in bulk, schedule directly to Instagram, and set up content queues. You can also share automatically from RSS feeds.
Then there's the analytics and report builder – both extremely good. Sendible supports quite a few different social media networks and has a mobile app.
Overall? One of the best social media tools around for the money. It's not just affordable for individuals. It's also affordable for agencies and in-house teams. User accounts are fairly priced.
However, the only significant limitation is that Sendible's social inbox feature no longer supports Twitter/X due to Elon's API price hikes.
Price: Plans start from $29/month which includes access to the social inbox. A free trial is available.
Learn more in our Sendible review.
#5 – Vista Social
Vista Social is a feature-rich all-in-one social media tool with a very strong social inbox, and a couple of features you won't find in other tools on this list.
The inbox works in a similar fashion to other tools on this list. Add your social accounts, and it'll pull in all of your social messages so you can reply.
The UI is well designed and it's easy to mark off messages or assign them to a team member. You can also add notes, use saved replies, and various filters.
Accounts aren't separated into workspaces like with some other tools. Instead, social accounts are grouped by brand. So, you can go through all messages at once or select specific accounts to check depending on your workflow.
Entry-level plans are affordable and include a lot of features but some features like spam management and task management aren't available on the basic plan.
In addition to the traditional social inbox, Vista Social also offers a separate tool that works in a similar way but for online reviews. This allows you to monitor reviews of your brand across multiple platforms and reply from a single interface.
This feature isn't available on the basic plan and the platforms that you can connect to this tool depend on your plan. You'll need Advanced or higher to access all platforms. For example, Facebook, Google Business, TrustPilot, etc.
There's also a social listening tool which you can use to run keyword searches and reply to comments directly. Like the review feature, this is available on higher plans only.
Despite some of the feature restrictions on various plans, Vista Social is one of the more affordable tools out there.
In addition, you'll find all the typical publishing and analytics tools you'd expect in a tool like this. The publishing/scheduling functionality is a bit weaker than other tools on this list. However, you get a lot of value for money here.
Based on Vista Social's functionality and pricing, I see it being best for customer service teams that want to keep costs low.
Price: Plans start from $39/month. Save 20% for yearly billing. Higher plans support more social profiles and users. Try it free for 14 days.
Read our Vista Social review.
#6 – Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a leading all-in-one SMM tool that features a pretty solid social media inbox, amongst other features.
The social inbox included in this tool is rather good. The UX is good and it includes an extremely deep feature set.
For example, aside from the typical basic workings of a unified inbox, you also get advanced automation, approval workflow for teams and you can see exactly when other team members are replying – great for avoiding crossovers.
You can filter your inbox by message type and specific social profile to further improve efficiency.
Then there's all of the other features you'd expect from an all-in-one social media tool – powerful social scheduling, data-rich analytics & reporting, and more.
The main gripe I have? Sprout Social is extremely expensive when compared to other social media inbox tools on this list.
The price point is a deal-breaker for smaller businesses and creators alike. Even if I was running an agency or handling marketing for a large brand, I'd have a hard time justifying the cost of Sprout Social. Especially when other tools are a fraction of the cost.
That said, I'd imagine there would be some use-cases where it would make sense. Particularly, if you need some of their advance features.
Price: Starts from $249/month, save up to 25% with annual billing. A free trial is available.
Read our Sprout Social review.
Final thoughts
If you aren't managing your social media accounts with a unified social media inbox, you are wasting huge amounts of time.
Using a tool with a unified social inbox is the key to effective and efficient social media management.
Are you ready to work smarter, not harder? Try one of these tools. Most of them have free trials so you can find the right solution for you.
I'd recommend starting with either Sendible or Pallyy. You can't go wrong with either. The cost to value ratio is excellent for both.
But if you're still unsure, I'd recommend checking out some of our other social media tool comparisons:
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