Facebook launches a unified inbox for businesses on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram

Facebook is unveiling a new feature that should make it easier for businesses to stay on top of conversations across Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram.

Benji Shomair, Facebook’s global head of Pages, described the new functionality as “one of our most frequent requests.”

Previously, if a businesses wanted to respond to customers on Facebook and Instagram, they had to open separate apps — an increasing challenge as more and more of their communication is happening on social media. (Facebook says Pages alone are seeing “nearly 5 billion comments, messages and visitor posts” each month.)

“There were some people even carrying multiple phones so that they can quickly respond to all the different things coming in,” he added.

Now those businesses can respond to all of those comments from Facebook’s Pages Manager app. The inbox in the app will now include a unified stream of all that commentary — including comments on their Facebook posts, posts on their Page, messages and comments on their Instagram and videos — as well as individual tabs for focusing on individual channels.

Facebook has already been testing this with select users and will be rolling it out more broadly over the next few weeks. (This will probably be more relevant to small and medium businesses, since large companies are more likely to use their own applications for managing their social media presence.)

Oh, and if you prefer just responding to Instagram comments while you’re in Instagram, of course you’ll still be able to do that.