When we talk about inboxes, like we did a few days ago with our inbox zero post, people naturally assume we’re referring to email inboxes (and we usually are). However, there are a few others that often get overlooked that can lead to missed opportunities.
Facebook’s “other” messages
The most common inbox to overlook is your “other” inbox in Facebook messages. People use the Facebook message system quite a lot, but if you get a message from someone that isn’t a “friend”, it lands in the other box. I’ve been known to miss messages in there from time to time, and many people don’t even know that the other box exists.
Pull up your Facebook messages, and you should see a small “other” link near the top. It’s likely mostly spam, but there can be legit messages to be found from time to time.
Twitter Mentions
I think businesses are worst about this than personal users, but many people ignore their Twitter “@ replies” and only look at their main stream. I did a test a few years ago where I sent messages on Twitter to 20 local car dealers that all promoted their Twitter account on their home page, and asked them each a simple question. Only two of them bothered to reply!
I’m guessing that it wasn’t intentional, but that they simply didn’t look for them. While tools like Hootsuite can make it easy to manage that stuff, you can always just click the “connect” tab at the top of Twitter to see what has been sent in your direction.
You probably have others
While those are two of the biggest places that people forget about messages, you likely have more depending on where you’re active (Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc). Be sure to keep an eye on all of your inboxes from time to time; you never know when the message you receive will be an important one!
