What is Salesforce Chatter Used For?
What is Salesforce Chatter and better yet, should you even be interested? Yes! But before we dive into our own explanation of why you should care about Salesforce Chatter, let’s take a quick look at how Salesforce defines their social network:
“Salesforce Chatter is the world’s #1 enterprise social network. This powerful collaboration software solution empowers employees to connect, collaborate, share files, data, and expertise, all in real-time. Chatter will help drive productivity and increase efficiency and innovation across departments. From sales, to marketing, to management, your entire company can use Chatter to tear down communication barriers and help your company grow and succeed as a team.”
Chatter is a key communication platform that connects departments that historically would never have communicated with each other. It also serves as an excellent resource for AEs and other Salesforce users looking for software solutions for the business like ERP to Salesforce integrations for example.
If you’ve never used Chatter before or still consider yourself a Chatter newbie, the best way to learn Chatter is through the Chatter Basics module in Trailhead.
4 of Our Favorite Salesforce Chatter Features
Chatter Groups
Chatter Groups can be created for your direct team, your entire business, or a specific project team. Chatter Groups come with various benefits with the most important being collaboration between users with common interests on a particular topic.
If you create a Chatter Group, you’re automatically the Group owner but you can assign a group manager that has similar permissions as you. The only restriction is that Group Managers cannot change the Group Owner or delete the Group.
You can also join a Chatter Group, like Commercient’s, by invitation. Our group is currently 360+ members and growing. If you would like to be part of our Chatter group, please contact noah@commercient.com with a request. He’ll get you in touch with our Salesforce AE and in the group.
Email Digest
After joining a Chatter Group, you’ll start receiving email notifications on activity within Chatter. You might find this a little annoying. No problem! You can control Chatter Group notifications by clicking the link below Group Engagement and selecting the frequency of notifications you’d like to receive.
Additionally, you can specify the frequency of all the notifications you receive (not just a specific Chatter Group) by utilizing the Email Settings options.
Quick Actions – Global Actions
Depending on your Org setup, you’ll have numerous Chatter Actions available to you on your Chatter tab. Standard Quick Actions you’ll see are: File, Link, Poll, Post, Thanks and Question.The cool thing about all of these Chatter Quick Actions is that they’re totally customizable using Global Publisher Layouts. Global Publisher Layouts are available in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Database.com and Developer editions.
Chatter Thanks
Another cool feature that comes with Chatter is Chatter Thanks. This feature makes it easy for you to drop a quick thank you note to any colleague. All you do is go to your Quick Actions bar, select Thanks, type the name of the person you want to thank and then click Change Badge.
You’ll then be presented with a space for you to type your message, select your audience and share. It’s as simple as that! Chatter Thanks is an easy feature to use and really comes in handy when you want to give someone a shoutout about a job well done.
Salesforce Chatter is a great internal collaboration app that is readily available right inside of Salesforce. Using an external app to collaborate with coworkers can get messy. With Chatter, there’s complete transparency between interdepartmental communications within your company.
