Understanding Salesforce Chatter Limits
Salesforce Chatter has a default limit of 500 records (including users) that you can follow, and if you try to follow more, you get an error telling you to unsubscribe from another record and try again. With the ability to notify followers when a field is updated or a comment is made, this limit can be quite frustrating. Limits like these are when optimizing Salesforce Chatter, and potentially automating multiple cases are important. It’s important to note that if you or your team is running into this limit, you can log a case with Salesforce Support to increase the limit to as much as 2000.
If you are going to increase this limit, or even if you are not, you may want to implement an Unfollow process to keep users from hitting the limit. This can be done using Flows that fire when a record is edited and meets the criteria, or after a set amount of time after the record was edited to meet the criteria, or even on a schedule that runs daily, weekly, or monthly.
Common Scenarios to Unfollow Records
1) Unfollow Opportunities 1 Day to 1 Week after they are Closed-Won
2) Unfollow Opportunities 1 Day to 1 Week after they are Closed-Lost
3) Unfollow Cases 2 Days to 1 Week after they are Closed
4) Unfollow Leads 1 Day after they are set as Unqualified
5) Unfollow Accounts 1 Day after they are changed from Customers to Previous Customers
6) Unfollow Contacts when they are no longer Primary Contacts or if they no longer work at their associated Accounts
Of course, Flow automation is an important part of optimizing Salesforce Chatter. You can have records automatically followed by users who need updates from them, and unfollowed when they’re no longer relevant. If this is something that you can use and would like help with, feel free to reach out and we would be glad to help you keep your Chatter followers lean and clean. We have a new free admin offering and could get your Salesforce Chatter cleaned up quickly.