Social Media Inbox for Multi-Location Brands: Who Answers What?
Niladri Sarkar, Synup

Hello, I'm Niladri from Synup, back today with another video. So picture this, you run a social media for a restaurant brand with, say, 100 plus or 120 locations. It's a week before Thanksgiving, early in the morning. Somebody asks one of your restaurant branches on its Facebook page if it's open for Thanksgiving. So the question just sits there and waits. About an hour later, somebody tags your main, the brand X account, about a charge that appeared twice.

And that happened at a branch maybe three states away from you. So it becomes kind of a Slack thread within the organization. Then an email to a regional manager and a branch manager. And one of them is out possibly till next week. Meanwhile, an office manager from the branch sends an Instagram DM to another location near her building inquiring about a catering service for like 60 people. That's probably the most valuable message that you've received since the morning. But it's sitting in an inbox that nobody probably opens for more than once a week. By that evening, another customer has answered the hours-related question on your behalf somewhere. And it's wrong, of course. The complaint has a dozen replies underneath in that X thread. So she basically ends up going to the deli down the street and booking them for the event. Here's the thing. Nobody in that entire story did anything wrong. There were three messages that landed on three different accounts that wasn't accessible by one person and who could see them all, let alone figure out which location each message was for and who was supposed to answer it, who owns the problem.

And that's one of the primary reasons why we built Synup's inbox in Social. A brand could schedule a post across all its locations, pages from Synup. But when people reply to those posts, leave behind comments and send a DM, there was no place inside Synup to see them all. So the idea is kind of simple. Bring every comment, mention, and DM into one place, whatever we can, because not all platforms allow you to access DMs. So, show people which location each one of those messages belong to within the same interface and give team a way to decide who owns it, who answers it, and close it out in a meaningful manner.

See, there are two kinds of teams we primarily built our platforms for. The first is the multi-location brand. A restaurant group, a dental chain, could be a fitness franchisee.

The second is the agency. You're managing social for lots of clients along with local SEO, and many of them have several locations of their own. Your team needs to work across all of them without having to log into each of those accounts individually. And there's a third group in the middle, franchisee systems where the brand sets the rules, but each owner runs their own store or more than one store. Different setups, kind of the same problem, too many accounts and not enough clarity as to who answers what and who owns what.

So this is your social inbox. You get to see all your messages in one place, be it a direct message or a comment on one of the posts. There are like 10 different filters that you can apply depending on the sentiment of the conversation or the intent or if you think it's a spam. Then Synup reads every message as it comes in. And we categorize them automatically. Is it a question that was asked by the customer? Was it a complaint? Was it a lead? You're not reading 200 messages to find the three that matter. This one matters more than it sounds. Facebook, Instagram lets you answer a DM for a limited time after the customer's last message. If you miss that window, you can't reply in that thread anymore. DMs are time-sensitive nature and gets pulled into the front of this queue.

From there on, your team works it together. You assign a message to the right person. By going to the message, you can set priority on it. They're going to receive a notification, and it will also show up in their Assigned to me section. Replies go out from the inbox as your page and not as Synup. So, for example, make it a point about certain things you shouldn't discuss in public. For example, billing, an order number, a specific health-related question the customer has. On Facebook and Instagram, you can reply privately to a public comment. And DMs work on Facebook, Instagram, and X, but DMs won't work on LinkedIn.

First, a small thing that trips teams up a lot. Two of those messages came through on the national accounts. The X tag and Facebook question about the brand page.

Now, since it's a national page, it does not belong to a specific store. So the message doesn't say which location. Somebody has to read it, work out which store it's about and tag it. The hours-related question, if they are open on Thanksgiving, is kind of easy. Even if the message comes into the national page, they can answer it straight away. The rule is kind of simple. If the answer depends on the store, the store owns it. If it's not dependent on them, anybody can answer. The double charge-related complaint on X is different. The national team won't be able to refund the card, but the branch managers can. So they can actually assign the message in the actual conversation with the details, all the details and move it to a kind of a private channel or have the manager handle it at the branch level. So when you're assigning to them, ensure that you have enough messages included in the comment.

That way they know exactly what's going on now what if the branch manager is not set up on Synup? What would you do then? So if you click on the three dots icon you can actually copy a link to the exact message or the permalink to the exact post where the message appears Put it in an email, write down your notes, send it via Slack or an email to the person who needs to handle it. Now, remember the catering DM? So it goes to the person at the location who can quote the numbers to her. But whoever picked up the message could at least ask him or her for a location, a phone number, contact phone, or an email because a lead without contact details is not a lead at all. Response time and resolution time are never the same.

You might reply to a specific complaint in like 10 minutes, but the actual issue that you need to resolve behind the scenes may take up to two days. I've also put together a triage matrix and a handoff checklist. The matrix kind of covers for each type of message, who owns it, who is the backup, what channel to use and how fast.

Well, for agencies, the big change is actually working across clients without juggling so many different logins. With the inbox, your team sees one queue in one place.

So someone who handles two restaurant clients sees those two because every reply drafts from that client's own brand profiles that you can set up. You can make sure that a dental client and a burger chain don't end up sounding like the same. And because Sydekick, our AI agent, can work with the inbox too, you can hand it some of the routine sorting and drafting. Remember, human in the loop, do not let AI respond on your behalf blindfolded. Make sure you review every task and every work before you hit the send button.

Now, before you connect a single account, it's worth spending an hour on the process itself.

One, decide what your headquarter or national team answers, if you're a multi-location brand, and what goes to each individual store. Two, name an owner and a backup for every location that we have mentioned before. Owners, because owners can go on vacation. Three, set your targets. How fast do you reply to a complaint? How fast do you fix it? Write both of them down because they are different numbers. Four, agree what never goes as a public reply. Credit card numbers, addresses, account information, anything to do with somebody's health. Those need to move to a private reply or a DM or an email later on. Five, connect your brand accounts and your location pages and start with a couple of regions before you roll it out everywhere. You find the gaps in your process fast this way, and it's easier to fix them when you have like five to 10 stores onboarded than when you have 200 stores onboarded and 300 people asking questions.

So that's kind of the social inbox. If you want to try it out with your location, just reach out to your account manager or just send us a message and we'll set you up. Thank you so much. And I'll talk to you again in a few days. Bye-bye.