Get Started with Chatter

Use Chatter in your favorite browser (1) or on your phone or other mobile device (2). The Salesforce mobile app offers a rich and powerful mobile interface for collaboration on the go.

Chatter helps you learn more about your coworkers and gives you an easy way to get in touch with them. In Chatter, everyone has a profile page with a photo and work-related information. Easily discover which teams your coworkers are on, who their managers are, where they’re located, and how to contact them.

One of the most useful communication tools in Chatter is following. You can follow people, groups, topics, files, and records, like opportunities and accounts. When you follow people, you see their posts, comments, and likes in your What I Follow feed. People can follow each other independent of their teams, which helps collaboration across functional borders. When you follow files, topics, and records, you are notified when they change. You can follow a maximum combined total of 500 people, topics, and records.

Tip

All Chatter users can configure their own email notification settings and control the number of notifications they receive.

At Salesforce, departments and functional teams have Chatter groups. Typically, groups are organized around a common goal or interest—from product-related groups in sales and marketing, to internal training, human resources, and facilities. The group feed provides a central point of communication for all group members. In the feed, group members can talk to each other, raising the visibility of information and creating a record that members can visit again and again.

Chatter’s advanced search engine lets people find files, people, groups, teams, work records, and other information. Over time, Chatter becomes your company's memory. It’s searchable and accessible anywhere, anytime. It connects people across departments and geographies.

Wait! Did we mention that Chatter’s fun? It gets people talking and makes them feel connected, powerful, and recognized.

Initially, a profile page is a blank canvas. Encourage your users to personalize their profiles. For example, have them add a realistic profile picture and some information about themselves. It helps people to recognize each other, connect, and collaborate.

Click someone’s name anywhere in Salesforce to see their profile page. The Feed tab (1) shows the user’s personal feed. The user goes here to see posts from the people, topics, files, and records they have followed. The Overview tab (1) shows information about that user (Skills and About Me). It also shows files the user owns, groups the user belongs to, who the user is following, and who’s following the user. The Recognition tab shows the badges, like the Thanks badge, the user received from others.

Note

You and your users may see other tabs besides Feed, Overview, and Recognition on the profile page.

The Contact section (3) is where users go to update their profile picture, contact information, and About Me content. Users can also update About Me on the Overview tab.

Now, switch to the Feed tab and post an update on your profile page.

Enter an update in the text box, and click Share.

You’ve just used the Chatter publisher. It’s the piece of the Chatter UI that you use to post content to a feed. The Chatter publisher appears not only on your profile page, but also on the Home tab, Chatter tab, and group and record detail pages. Users can post updates, attach a file or a link, publish a poll, or ask a question. The More menu can provide even more options, like posting a special thank you badge to thank a coworker for an assist.

Salesforce provides various group types for different purposes and audiences.

Unlisted groups and group records are disabled by default. We enable them under Setup on the Chatter Settings page before we create our groups.

Create a Public Group

Let’s create a public group named Volunteer Central, where employees can find information and ask questions about volunteer events.

1. Open the Chatter tab and click Groups on the left, or click the Groups tab. This action takes you to the Groups list view.
2. Click New Group.
   
3. Name your group (1) and describe what the group is all about (2). The group access is set to public by default (3), so you don’t have to make any changes here.
4. Click Save.

That’s it! You’ve created your first group.

Next, finish setting up the group. Upload a picture, and add group members.

• Hover over the group picture, click Add Photo, then click Choose File. Select an image file from your local machine. Depending on the type of group, try to find an interesting or fun image that represents the group or helps people identify with the group.
• Click Add Members (1) to seed the group with a few initial members. Ideally, you want to add subject matter experts and influential people in your company. These experts can start collaborating in the group before you send out invitations to others. Also consider promoting one or more members to be group managers. As group managers, they can add more people, update the description, and help you manage the group.

Create a Private Group with Customers

Private Chatter groups are a great way for product teams to collaborate and share confidential information. Private groups can also have external members. For example, create a private group to collaborate with customers or subject matter experts outside the company.

You create a private group the same way you create a public group, but you assign different access levels.

1. Open the Chatter tab and click Groups on the left, or click the Groups tab. Now you’re in the Groups list view.
2. Click New Group.
3. Add a group name and description.
4. In the Group Access section, select Private and Allow Customers.
5. Click Save.
6. Confirm that you want to create a private group that allows customer members, meaning you’re allowing people outside of your company to join the group.

Private groups that allow customer members have a visual reminder on the group picture—an orange Private With Customers banner. People outside the company who join the group are listed in the Members section under CUSTOMERS (1).

When you turn on Chatter for your company, it sets up some “following” relationships automatically. For example, if your company has less than 16 Chatter users, all users automatically follow each other and up to 25 most recently used records. If your company has 16 users or more, they automatically follow up to 25 of their most recently used records. They also automatically follow up to 25 users in the company, including:

People can change which records and people they follow.

For example, to follow or unfollow a person, hover over their name anywhere in the application and click to follow or to stop following.

Everything comes together on the Chatter tab, where different views and filters let your users choose the updates they see in their feeds.

Users can keep the default notifications you set up, or they can configure their own email settings. Users control whether they want to receive emails, the changes they want to be notified about, and how often they’re notified. It’s important to teach your users how they can control the amount of email they receive. Too many email notifications are a pain point for many Chatter users and a common barrier to adoption.

You enable email notifications for all users in Setup, on the Chatter Email Settings page.

To navigate to the Email Notifications page, users click the down arrow next to their name at the top of any Salesforce page and select My Settings. Under My Settings, they expand the Chatter node and click Email Notifications.

To receive Chatter mail, Receive emails must be selected. The following sections describe configuration settings you can suggest to your users to avoid Chatter email overload.

Email Me When Someone

Strongly advise your users to be selective about their personal email settings. Encourage them to enable notifications that help them stay on top of important discussions without overwhelming them with too much email.

Option	Recommended	Notes
Follows me
Posts on my profile		People connect directly by posting questions or information to a profile. With this option, your users can ensure that they get notified.
Shares a post I made
Likes or upvotes my post or comment
Comments on my posts		This option provides notification for actions taken on feed-tracked changes. A feed-tracked change is a change that your user makes in Salesforce that triggers an automatic post to the user’s Chatter feed. Enabling this option notifies your user when someone comments on that post.
Comments on a post on my profile
Comments after me		After a user comments on an item, this option ensures that they get notified.
Comments on an item I bookmarked		If your users use bookmarks to track items they’re interested in, they get an email each time that someone comments. If your users typically use likes to track items of interest, then this option is less important.
Comments on an item I like		After your users like an item, they can get notified when someone comments on the item after their like.
Mentions me in a post		People use mentions to ask for input and draw others into discussions; this setting ensures that your users get notified.
Mentions me in a comment		People use mentions to ask for input and draw others into discussions; this setting ensures that your users get notified.
Sends me a message		Users get notified when people send private Chatter messages, including notifications about files that have been shared with them.
Endorses me on a topic

Set Frequency for Personal Digest

Email digests conveniently summarize recent activity in Chatter so your users don’t miss important discussions. They can choose to receive personal or group digests on a daily or weekly basis, and some digest settings are customizable. Personal digests include the updates users see in their own Chatter feed. For example, users see updates about the people, records, and files they follow and the groups they belong to. Group digests include the updates they see in a particular group’s Chatter feed.

Option	Recommended	Notes
Daily		Daily digests include the 50 latest posts from the previous day and the three latest comments on each post.
Weekly		Weekly digests include the 50 latest posts from the week and the three latest comments on each post.
Never		If your users are selective about the options in the “Email me when someone” section, they might not need to receive personal digests.

Set Default Frequency for Groups I Join

When your users change the default frequency of notifications for groups they join, it doesn’t affect the groups they already belong to.

Option	Recommended	Notes
Email on every post
Daily digests		Daily digests include the 50 latest posts from the previous day and the three latest comments on each post.
Weekly digests		Weekly digests include the 50 latest posts from the week and the three latest comments on each post.
Limited		Advise your users to keep this default setting for all new groups. Whenever they join a group they expect to actively monitor and contribute to, they can change to more frequent notifications for that group.

A Chatter feed combines the Chatter publisher and the feed. The publisher appears on the Home and Chatter tabs, the user profile page, and group and record pages. Your users can use the publisher to write a post (1), ask a question (2), and create a poll (3). They can also perform other actions that you make available to them on the More menu (4).

Depending on how you set up Chatter for your organization, everyone with access to a post can comment on it, like it, and share it (1). They can also edit, bookmark, add topics to, and mute it (2). People can delete their own posts, but they can’t delete other people’s posts nor posts that Salesforce generates automatically. For example, they can’t delete record updates, such as a post about a changed field on an account.

Note

People with the permission Modify all Data can delete other people’s posts.

Let’s post to a group and attach a file.

The file is uploaded to the group, and group members can click the link in the post to open the file. The file also appears under Group Files on the right side of the page.

Chatter Feeds

When your users follow people and records, they see posts, comments, and updates about them in their Chatter feeds. Chatter feeds appear on profile and group pages, the Home tab, topic pages, and on record pages. Typically, people see feed updates for:

• Posts, comments, and files on Chatter groups they're a member of
• Shared files and links
• Tasks and events
• Record field changes

People can view a particular feed (1) and filter (2) and sort (3) a feed.

There are several ways for users to add topics. The fastest way is to use a hashtag (#). For example, when a user posts “I’m going to attend #Dreamforce this year,” “Dreamforce” is automatically added as a topic. Users can click a topic to see all other content that was tagged with that topic. They can also search for a topic and find all posts they can access that include that topic. Your users can also add topics to their own and other’s posts at any time directly in the feed (1, 2).

Besides clicking or searching for a topic, users can click Topics (3) to navigate to the topics list. The topics list shows the topics that people are talking about in your organization. All topic names appear in this list, including topics used solely in private groups or on records.

Note

Users can navigate only to content they have access to. Imagine a topic that appears in a private group and you are not a member. You click the topic and see most of the content that’s tagged with that topic. You can’t see any topic content from the private group. If you become a member of the private group, that content becomes available to you.

Apart from adding topics to posts, users can also add topics to any objects you allow. Adding topics to objects is one of the most powerful ways to crowdsource your company's key themes and issues. Once you set it up, your employees can add topics to object records. Doing so can give your business insight into the voice of your customer. Because topics can cross objects, they can provide connections across people, conversations, and records.