Chatter Group
A Chatter Group is a shared collaboration space in Salesforce that has its own membership, feed, and files.
Definition
A Chatter Group is a shared collaboration space in Salesforce that has its own membership, feed, and files. People join a group to follow one focused conversation instead of wading through the global company feed. Each group carries an access level (Public, Private, or Unlisted), an owner, optional managers, and members who post, comment, and share files in the group's own feed.
Groups exist to give a team, project, or topic its own room. A Public group is open to everyone in the org. A Private group is members only and people ask to join. An Unlisted group is hidden from search and runs invitation only. Private and unlisted groups can also include external customers through Experience Cloud, which makes a Chatter Group one of the few places internal staff and outside partners share a single Salesforce feed.
How Chatter Groups are built and run
The three access levels and who can post
Every Chatter Group has exactly one access level, set when the group is created. A Public group lets anyone in the org see the feed, join, and add posts, comments, and files. It suits open communities of practice where discovery matters more than privacy. A Private group is members only. The feed, posts, and files are visible only to members, and people request to join while an owner or manager approves them. Private fits a project team or a sensitive working group. An Unlisted group goes one step further. It does not appear in list views, search, or the group directory, and people cannot ask to join. Only owners and managers can invite members, and only members plus users holding the Manage Unlisted Groups permission can see or post to it. Unlisted is the right choice for confidential work such as a re-org plan or an executive thread. One caveat with private access: users who hold Modify All Data or View All Data can still read private group content across the org, so private is not the same as invisible.
Owners, managers, and members
A group has a simple role model that covers most teams without extra configuration. The owner is the single person ultimately responsible for the group, and there is one owner per group. Owners can transfer ownership, change the access level, edit group settings, archive the group, and remove members. Managers are members the owner promotes to share the workload. They can approve or decline join requests, add or remove members, change some settings, and help curate the feed. Everyone else is a member who reads the feed, posts, comments, and adds files. The split matters because an active group needs someone tending it. Managers let a busy owner delegate day-to-day moderation without handing over the whole group. When an owner leaves the company, transfer ownership before the user is deactivated, otherwise the group can end up orphaned with no one able to change its settings or approve pending requests.
The group feed and files
Each group has its own Chatter feed that is separate from the global What I Follow feed. Posts, comments, polls, and shared files accumulate in the group's context, so the project's conversation stays in one place instead of scattering across personal feeds. In Lightning Experience the group feed is live, meaning new posts and comments appear without a manual page refresh. The files area is one of the most heavily used parts of an active group. Project teams drop decks, specifications, and reference documents there, and every member gets access without separate sharing rules. A file shared to a group is governed by the group's membership, which is a clean way to scope a working document to exactly the people on the project. Because the feed is record-aware, members can also share Salesforce records into the group, which is the practical reason teams keep a group alongside the data they work on rather than moving everything to an outside tool.
Broadcast Only groups for announcements
A broadcast group is a Public, Private, or Unlisted group with one setting flipped on: only owners and managers can post. Members can still read every post and comment on it, but they cannot start a new thread. The setting is called Broadcast Only and it exists in both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. The point is signal control. A normal group invites everyone to post, which is great for a working team but noisy for a company-wide channel. Broadcast Only turns a group into a one-to-many announcement surface. Common uses include executive updates, HR policy notices, IT maintenance alerts, and event coordination, where a small set of authors needs a wide, quiet audience. You can change a group to or from Broadcast Only after creation, so a noisy all-hands group can be calmed down later. Because comments stay open, members still have a place to ask clarifying questions without the feed filling up with unrelated posts.
Automatic archiving and inactivity
When an admin enables group archiving in Chatter Settings, groups archive themselves after a stretch of silence. The rule is precise: a group with no new feed posts or comments for 90 consecutive days is archived automatically. Mentioning the group does not count as activity, so a passing at-mention will not keep a dying group alive. Archiving does not delete anything. Previous posts, comments, and files stay available, members can still comment on existing posts and search the feed, and people can join or leave. What an archived group blocks is new posts and new file shares. Archived groups also stop appearing in regular feeds unless an old post gets a fresh comment. One genuinely useful detail: archived groups do not count toward a user's 300-group membership limit, so an org can retain years of historical groups without burning anyone's quota. Owners and managers can archive, reactivate, and toggle automatic archiving for a group at any time, so nothing is permanent.
Limits and external customers
Chatter Groups have hard limits worth knowing before you design a program around them. A single user can be a member of up to 300 groups, and an org can hold up to 30,000 groups in total. Those ceilings are generous for most companies but real, which is one more reason archiving inactive groups matters. The external-collaboration angle is what makes groups distinct. A Private or Unlisted group can include customers when Allow Customers is checked, letting people outside the org take part through Experience Cloud. External members interact only with the group and its members; they cannot see other Salesforce data. The Allow Customers choice is locked once the group is created, so decide up front whether outsiders belong in the group. Creating a group requires the Create and Own New Chatter Groups permission, and creating unlisted groups requires the admin to enable unlisted groups for the org first. Both controls live in profiles, permission sets, and Chatter Settings.
Chatter Groups and Slack channels
Salesforce owns Slack, and many orgs now run most real-time collaboration in Slack channels rather than Chatter Groups. That raises a fair question about overlap. The honest answer is that the two serve different centers of gravity. Slack channels are strong for cross-tool, fast, conversational work that spans more than Salesforce. Chatter Groups are strong for record-anchored work, where the conversation belongs next to the Salesforce data and people share records, files, and posts that stay inside the platform. A lot of production orgs use both, with Chatter Groups for Salesforce-centric collaboration and Slack for everything else. The trap is running a duplicate group and channel for the same topic, which splits the conversation and frustrates everyone. Pick one canonical surface per use case and link to it. If your org has fully standardized on Slack, you may use Chatter Groups sparingly, but they remain the native way to scope a feed and a file set to a team without leaving Salesforce.
Create a Chatter Group
You create a Chatter Group from the Groups tab. You need the Create and Own New Chatter Groups permission, and creating an unlisted group requires your admin to enable unlisted groups for the org. You become the owner of any group you create.
- Open the Groups tab
Click the Groups tab, or find Groups in the App Launcher, then click New Group on the Groups list page.
- Name and describe the group
Enter a Group Name that is unique across public and private groups, and write a short Description that states the group's purpose so members know why it exists.
- Choose the access level
Select Public, Private, or Unlisted. This decides who can see and post, and Unlisted only appears if your admin enabled unlisted groups.
- Set optional behavior
Check Allow Customers to include external members in a private or unlisted group, and turn on Broadcast Only if only owners and managers should post. Adjust automatic archiving if your admin enabled it.
- Save and add members
Save the group, then add or invite members, optionally promote a few to manager, and pin a welcome post that states the posting guidelines.
A unique name across public and private groups. It is the group's primary label in lists, search, and feeds.
Public, Private, or Unlisted. Required because it sets visibility and who can post. Unlisted needs the org setting enabled.
- The Allow Customers setting is permanent. You cannot turn external access on or off after the group is created.
- Unlisted is not an option unless an admin has enabled unlisted groups for the org under Chatter Settings.
- Users with Modify All Data or View All Data can read private group content org-wide, so private is not fully hidden.
- If archiving is enabled, a group with no posts or comments for 90 consecutive days archives itself; a mention does not reset the clock.
Prefer this walkthrough as its own page? How to Chatter Group in Salesforce, step by step
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Chatter Groups OverviewSalesforce
- Create Chatter GroupsSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Chatter Group.
- Broadcast GroupsSalesforce
- Chatter Group ArchivingSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Chatter Group.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. Which everyday need does spinning up a Chatter Group address best?
Q2. Which set names the three visibility levels a Chatter Group can have?
Q3. What commonly happens to a Chatter Group created without an active owner?
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