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Work the Inbox Social Mentions queue

A social mention is a public post that names your brand — an X/Twitter post, a Reddit thread, a Trustpilot or G2 review, a comment under one of your Instagram or Facebook posts — captured by a listening connector and routed into the Inbox as a normal conversation. The Inbox → Social mentions queue is where those mentions land, so social care gets the same triage, assignment, and reply workflow your team already runs for private channels instead of a separate tool.

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1. What social mentions are

A mention is not a DM. A DM is a private thread with context attached; a mention is a standalone public post with none. When a listening source captures one, the connector posts it to POST /inbox/social-mentions/ingest and the Inbox writes it as an inbound message on a social_mention-channel conversation:
  • Standalone mentions (X/Twitter, Reddit, reviews, news, forums) group into one conversation per public author, so a second post from the same author continues their thread.
  • Post comments (instagram_comment / facebook_comment) thread per parent post instead — every comment on one post lands in a single replyable conversation, because the post is the context.
  • Duplicates collapse. Re-delivering a mention the connector already sent is a no-op, so a polling source can retry safely. A genuinely new mention rings the org admins’ notification bell.
Because a mention arrives as an ordinary conversation, assignment, tags, macros, SLA clocks, and AI drafts all apply to it unchanged.

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2. Enable the sources

Mentions enter only through the ingest endpoint — point your listening source at it, one POST per mention. The platform token you send is what the queue filter and each row’s chip display: The minimal body is platform, the source’s stable mention id (external_id), a permalink back to the original post, the author_handle, and the post text. Add matched_keyword, sentiment, reach, and posted_at when your source has them — the queue renders all four. For the two comment platforms, send post_id plus the optional post_permalink, post_title, and parent_comment_id context. Posting into the queue is restricted to owners and admins — it writes on behalf of an automated connector — while reading the queue is open to any operator. The Social listening reference carries full curl samples, the idempotency contract, and one example connector body per platform.

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3. Triage a mention

Open Inbox → Social mentions. The queue defaults to open mentions, newest activity first. Each row shows the author’s display name, a preview of the mention text, the platform chip, and an unread count, with two links: one that opens the Inbox conversation, and one that opens the original public post in a new tab.
  • Sentiment pre-score. When the source attaches sentiment, the row shows it as a chip — green positive, red negative, muted neutral — so a review storm sorts itself before you open a single row. Use the sentiment condition in your routing rules to push negative mentions to a senior queue or round-robin.
  • Route with keyword and sentiment. Routing rules cannot match on the mention channel itself, but they can match on what the connector supplies: the sentiment label pushes negative mentions to a senior queue or round-robin, and the keyword condition catches the matched_keyword text so a review source or a campaign hashtag lands with the team that owns it. A mention nobody routes stays unassigned at the top of the queue.
  • Filter and page. Scope the queue by platform and by status (open, snoozed, closed, or all). Load more pages through a high-volume day instead of capping the list at one screen. Triage is currently an owner/admin surface; agents work a mention once its conversation is assigned to them.

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4. Respond in-channel from the Inbox

Open the row’s conversation link and reply from the same composer every other channel uses: read the original post through the permalink, reply in the thread, then close or snooze the queue row to keep the open view clean. If the author posts again, the conversation reopens under status → all. For Instagram and Facebook post comments, a new comment can also fire your published comment-received automation, which sends a private DM to the commenter while the public thread stays in the queue — the ManyChat-class comment-to-DM pattern, driven by your own flows.

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5. Measure mention volume and response time

Mentions are conversations, so they report under the same measures as every other channel:
  • Volume. Track incoming volume through the queue itself — the row count under each platform filter — and through the comments/messages analytics you already use for other channels. The queue pages, so “how many this week” is a filter read, not an export.
  • Response time. Attach an SLA policy with per_channel scope to the social_mention channel and every mention conversation picks up first-response and resolution clocks, breach pills, and breach actions — the same setup described in the SLA timers guide.
  • Tone over time. The provider-attached sentiment on each mention rolls into portfolio-level sentiment reporting — see Read the sentiment portfolio dashboard for the net-sentiment trend and breakdowns.
Pair the two: volume by platform tells you where the public conversation happens, and first-response clocks tell you whether the team keeps up with it.

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6. When not to use Social Mentions

The queue is for public brand posts that need reading and, where it matters, a public or private reply. It is not the right surface for:
  • Private 1:1 messages. Instagram DMs, Messenger DMs, and every direct channel land in the main conversation queue through their own connectors — do not route them through mention ingest to force them into one list.
  • Tracked issues with a lifecycle. If a mention turns into a case the team owns until resolution — an outage complaint, a refund request, a legal or safety flag — file it as a ticket and work the Inbox Tickets workflow: a ticket keeps the status lifecycle, assignment history, and SLA state that a conversation deliberately does not.
  • Effects another team’s guideline owns. Brand-level marketing responses to praise are usually a social-media team’s call; the queue’s job is to make sure support sees the ones that need support.
The split mirrors the rest of the Inbox — Inbox setup covers the channels, routing, and SLA workspace the queue lives inside — so a mention never needs a second system to become a conversation, and only graduates to a ticket when the work outlives the thread.

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See also