Responding to your Instagram DMs is about to get faster and more efficient!
Following an announcement from Facebook, the social media giant is about to roll out the ability to receive and respond to Instagram Direct Messages from your Facebook Page Inbox. Soon, Facebook Page Admins, Community Managers and Customer Service employees will be able to respond, read and manage all their Messenger and Instagram DMs from a unified location which will help in speeding and facilitating communication with clients, especially during busy periods, making it easier for businesses to communicate, efficiently respond to customers and stay connected with communities.
So, what does this mean for businesses?
Say goodbye to splitting your attention between both platforms while monitoring other platforms too and say hello to efficiency. Receiving a healthy inflow of DMs on Instagram and Facebook indicates that your audience is engaged with your content and now you will be able to respond to comments and inquiries swiftly from a single place, which surely speeds up the workflow, facilitating better communication with your audience.
With this plan comes even a bigger long-term plan and that’s the integration of the three platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp by 2020. The apps will still exist as stand-alone apps; however, the messaging functionality would be shared across them, meaning, that Instagram users could text people on Whatsapp, people can even message an Instagram user without having to create an Instagram account and so on.
This prompts the question of security!
Unifying the apps means all three apps will support end-to-end encryption, which Instagram lacks. End-to-end encryption means that all your messages whether it is in a form of audio, text or visuals are secured, ensuring that only the communicating parties know what’s being sent or said. However, given Facebook’s history when it comes to privacy and security, merging the messaging services will probably raise more privacy and security questions, especially that Facebook requires users to provide a real identity while Whatsapp is often chosen for its anonymity.
Could Facebook’s unified Page Inbox be the first step in accelerating the process?
Well, folks, we hope you enjoyed reading this week’s blog courtesy of #SocialSpeak. Tune in next week for more updates revolving around the latest trends and topics in Social.
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