How do I interact with LinkedIn Page direct messages (DMs) in Sprout?

LinkedIn engagement is imperative for your brand. With LinkedIn Page DMs (also called LinkedIn private messages) in Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you’ll never miss an engagement opportunity with your audience. You’ll gain a holistic view of all incoming messages in one place, while creating a stronger and more organized one-to-one connection.

You can access LinkedIn Page DMs under Message Types in your Smart Inbox.

Your LinkedIn Page DMs appear in the Smart Inbox in real time alongside messages across other channels, so you can integrate this new message type into your existing workflows, responding and engaging with your LinkedIn audience.

Required prerequisites

In order to receive Page DMs in the Smart Inbox, you need to ensure that your Linkedin Page is enabled for Direct Messages; and the privacy settings are configured correctly on LinkedIn. For more details, see this how-to guide.

Reauthorizing profiles

If you want LinkedIn Page DMs from multiple profiles to appear in the Smart Inbox, you must re-authorize each LinkedIn profile. To do this:

1. Click to expand the notifications drawer.
2. Navigate to the Profile Issues section.
3. Click on the notification regarding your LinkedIn profile.
4. Click Reauthorize. A popup appears sending you to LinkedIn for reauthorization.
5. Click Ok.

After you’re redirected, complete the authorization process. Now you can access your LinkedIn Page DMs in the Smart Inbox.

Replying to a LinkedIn Page DM

To reply to a LinkedIn DM:

1. Navigate to the Smart Inbox.
2. (Optional) Update your filters in the Filter Menu to select the LinkedIn profiles you want to see.
3. Click to reply to a DM. The reply screen appears.
4. Enter your response to the DM.
5. Click Send or Submit for Approval based on your team’s workflow.

Filtering the Smart Inbox

If you want to focus on responding, creating cases, tagging and interacting with just your DMs, use the Message Type filters Direct Messages in addition to the LinkedIn filters to remove the clutter from your Smart Inbox.

You can also create a custom Inbox View that only contains Direct Messages. To learn more about creating Inbox Views, see this article.

Message Content Expiration

Messaging data from LinkedIn can be stored for up to six weeks. After that, the content itself will no longer be visible.  Don’t forget - you can still view message content natively by clicking the timestamp to open the conversation on LinkedIn, and in the rare event that you need to respond to a DM older than six weeks, you can still reply from Sprout.

You’ll see this reflected in the experience shown in the screenshot below.

For more information on LinkedIn Page messaging, please visit their Help Center here.