Community Expert
A Community Expert is a user designated by a site admin to appear as a verified knowledge holder within a Salesforce Experience Cloud site.
Definition
A Community Expert is a user designated by a site admin to appear as a verified knowledge holder within a Salesforce Experience Cloud site. The badge sits next to the user's name in feed posts, question threads, and member profiles, and signals to other members that this person's answers carry more weight than a typical reply.
The designation is set per site, not per org, so the same internal user can be marked an expert in one customer portal and a regular member in another. Experts are usually a small group: top-performing support agents, recurring contributors from a partner firm, or product owners who answer questions in their own domain. The role does not grant any additional record access or permissions. It is a recognition layer that shapes how other members perceive that user's contributions in the community feed.
How the Community Expert badge is set and what it changes
How experts are assigned
A site admin opens Experience Workspaces, goes to Administration, then to Members, and marks individual users with the Community Expert checkbox. The assignment is per site, so the same user can be an expert in the Customer Portal and not in the Partner Portal. Salesforce caps the number of experts you can designate per site based on the edition and license profile, so it is intended to be selective. Once marked, the next time the user posts in a feed or answers a question, the badge appears next to their name.
What the badge changes in the feed
The Community Expert label appears beside the user's name on every feed post, comment, and question reply within that site. The badge does not change record access, sharing rules, or any permission set assignment. It does change visual ranking: in some Aura site templates, expert answers are surfaced above newer answers, and the Salesforce mobile app for Experience Cloud highlights expert replies in question threads.
Community Expert vs Salesforce MVP
Salesforce MVP is a global recognition awarded by Salesforce HQ to top contributors across the entire Trailblazer ecosystem, with an annual nomination and review cycle. It applies to the public Trailblazer Community and to the user profile on trailblazer.me. Community Expert is local to a single Experience Cloud site, set by the site admin, and exists for the site audience only. A Salesforce MVP is not automatically a Community Expert in a customer portal, and vice versa.
Verified Answer and the related but different markup
Experience Cloud has a separate Verified Answer flag that question askers or moderators can apply to a single answer within a thread. Verified Answer marks one reply as the canonical solution; Community Expert marks the person. The two are unrelated but often overlap, because expert users tend to write the answers that get verified.
Setting experts at scale through Data Loader or API
For programs with many experts, a large partner network for example, the Setup UI is impractical. The NetworkMember object exposes the expert flag through the API, so Data Loader or a custom Apex job can bulk-update expert status for hundreds of users at once. This is the path most enterprise rollouts take.
Reputation system and how Community Expert sits inside it
Experience Cloud sites can also enable a Reputation system, where members earn points for posts, answers, and likes, and progress through tiers like Contributor, Expert, and Trusted Advisor. That tier list is computed from activity. Community Expert is a manually-set flag separate from the Reputation tier and does not change a user point total or tier name. Many sites use both: Reputation drives organic recognition while Community Expert tags the official subject matter authorities.
Why the Community Expert layer fell out of favor
Salesforce has shifted recognition energy toward the global Trailblazer Community (badges, ranks, MVP) and away from per-site expert flags. New sites built in LWR (Lightning Web Runtime) do not display the expert badge in stock components, only in Aura sites and the older Visualforce templates. Many companies that built communities in 2014 to 2018 still rely on the flag; new builds tend to use Reputation tiers or custom badges instead.
How to designate a Community Expert
Designating a Community Expert means marking a user record inside Experience Workspaces. The flag is per site and per user, and Salesforce limits how many you can designate, so the workflow is selective by design.
- Open Experience Workspaces
From Setup, go to Digital Experiences, All Sites, then click Workspaces next to the site that should hold the expert.
- Open the Members view
Inside Workspaces, click Administration, then Members. The list shows every active member of the site.
- Search for the user
Filter by username or profile to find the user you want to mark. The list paginates, so use search rather than scrolling for any site with more than a few hundred members.
- Mark the Community Expert checkbox
Click the user row, find the Community Expert checkbox in the side panel, and save. The badge appears within a few minutes once page caches refresh.
- Verify the badge shows
Log in as an external user in incognito, open a feed item the expert posted, and confirm the badge renders next to the name. If it does not, the site template may not support the badge (LWR sites need a custom component).
- Salesforce caps the count of experts per site based on edition; the checkbox silently fails to save if you exceed the cap.
- LWR templates do not render the expert badge in stock components. Use Aura, Visualforce, or build a custom LWC that reads the flag.
- The badge is local to the one site. Marking someone expert in your Customer Portal does not flag them in your Partner Portal.
- Community Expert grants zero additional permissions. If you want experts to also moderate posts, separately assign them to the Community Moderator role.
- Removing the checkbox does not retroactively change past posts in cached feeds; the badge may linger for hours until the cache rebuilds.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Manage Site MembersSalesforce Help
- Reputation in Experience Cloud SitesSalesforce Help
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Community Expert.
- Experience Cloud Site SetupSalesforce Help
- NetworkMember Object ReferenceSalesforce Developers
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. What is a Community Expert?
Q2. Why does the expert designation matter?
Q3. How can organizations support Community Experts?
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