What is Chatter?

Chatter is a native collaboration tool in Salesforce that allows users to communicate and share information in real-time, helping streamline your workflow. Chatter connects, engages, and motivates users to work efficiently across the organization regardless of role or location. Users can even work together on projects with embedded apps and custom actions. Think of Chatter as a free social media collaboration tool similar to Twitter or Facebook.

Learn more about your coworkers and how to easily get in touch with them.  In Chatter, each user has a profile page with their photo and important work-related information. Easily discover which teams your coworkers are on, who their managers are, where they are located, and how to contact them.

One of the most useful features in Chatter is Following.  Following is a way to keep track of the people and records that interest you.  Follow people, groups, topics, files, and records (e.g. Contacts and Companies). When you 'follow' someone, you see their posts, comments, and likes in your What I Follow feed. Users can follow each other independent of teams, which allows collaboration across functional borders. When you follow files, topics, and records, you are notified when those records are updated. You can follow a maximum combined total of 500 people, topics, and records.

Chatter groups make collaboration easier, take project management to another level, and provide a great way for teams to keep up. Groups are the main collaboration space in Chatter. Groups are where people organize around a shared interest, purpose, or goal. People use groups to share information, post updates, and ask questions.

When you enable Chatter, certain following relationships are put in place automatically.  For example, if your company has less than 16 Chatter users, then all users will automatically follow each other and up to 25 most recently used records. If your company has 16 users or more, they will automatically follow up to 25 of their most recently used records.

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