Our Salesforce Best Practice of the Week: Salesforce Chatter Tips

Salesforce Chatter takes the fundamental communication and collaboration features of a consumer social network and implements it on a social enterprise level.

The end result is social platform for business communications that hooks into the existing Salesforce platform seamlessly and can greatly improve the ability of your employees to communicate and collaborate to produce great work.

Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your Salesforce Chatter.

Know who will see your posts

• Posts entered in the status box on your profile or home page, as well as posts entered on your co-worker’s page are visible to all.

• Posts on a record (account, contact, opportunity) or group are only visible to people who have access to that record or group.

Be careful on what you post

• Ask yourself if your CEO or supervisor would find this inappropriate before hitting submit.

• If you post about a co-worker that is not a member of your group, and they later join, they will see that post so be nice

• Since posts are stored indefinitely until deleted, be careful or one may come back to haunt you.

• Ask yourself if anyone else will be interested before posting.

Deleting posts

• You can only delete posts that you made.

• System administrators can delete all posts.

Administrators should:

• Post weekly tips for the most common issues that they get from users to reduce their workload.

• Post information about new functionality or changes to make the transition easier for their users.

• Celebrate success by sharing great use cases, quotes, etc.

• Share FAQ or help files as needed

Supervisors should:

• Update their status frequently. If you move around a lot, update your status so your people will know where to find you if needed

• Share useful links that you may have found that can help your team like a new time zone converter or area code look-up site.

• Solicit feedback and ideas. Post your question and let your team comment; it beats sitting in a conference room

• Share customer stories and lessons learned. Get the word out on what works!

• Post meeting notes to keep your team informed.

All users should:

• Cut down on broadcast emails by posting to Chatter instead.

• Follow key executives, your team, key records, and subject matter experts.

• Post your skills and expertise on your profile so people looking for help can easily message you.

• Un-follow records that are not important to cut down on Chatter noise.

• Use email when the communication needs to be one-to-one or there is sensitive data.

• Use Chatter when you want to notify a large audience or expect a back-and-forth conversation.

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