Sharing, Chatter
A Chatter Share is an action on a feed post that re-surfaces that existing post into a different feed, such as a Chatter group, your own profile feed, or your followers.
Definition
A Chatter Share is an action on a feed post that re-surfaces that existing post into a different feed, such as a Chatter group, your own profile feed, or your followers. It does not copy the text into a brand-new post. It places a reference to the original post into a new audience so people outside the original scope can see it, while the original stays where it was written.
Share sits alongside the other reactions you can take on a post. A Comment adds a reply that stays attached to the original post. A Like is a lightweight reaction. A Share moves the post itself into a new feed context and links back to the source, so reactions and comments stay anchored to the original rather than being duplicated.
How the Share action moves a post between feeds
Where Share lives and what it does
The Share action appears under an individual post in the Chatter feed, next to Comment and Like. When you click it, you pick a destination feed instead of writing a new post. The original post keeps its place, and a shared copy that points back to it lands in the audience you chose. This is the part people miss. Share is not a copy-paste of the content into your own words. It is a pointer that lets a wider group read the same post without the original author having to rewrite it. Salesforce documents three destinations. You can share to a Chatter group, to your own profile so your followers see it, or you can grab a link to the post and send it through email or instant message. Each path widens the post's reach in a slightly different way. Sharing to a group puts it in front of everyone who follows that group. Sharing to your profile puts it in front of the people who follow you. A link is the most direct, since it points one named recipient straight at the post. Because the shared version references the source, anyone reading it can click through to where the conversation actually lives. Comments and reactions stay on the original, which keeps a single thread of discussion instead of fragmenting it across feeds.
Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic behave differently
The Share action is not identical across the two interfaces, and the difference matters when you train users. In Salesforce Classic, sharing carries the original post along with any files and attachments on it. In Lightning Experience, you share only the post itself. Attachments, comments, and likes do not travel with it. That is a deliberate trade. Lightning keeps the shared copy lean and treats the original as the single source of truth for everything attached to it. Editing behavior follows the same logic. In Lightning Experience, when you edit the original of a post that has been shared, the shared version updates to match. You are not maintaining two separate copies. You are maintaining one post that happens to be visible in more than one feed. Notifications also split by interface. In Classic, the original poster gets an email when their post is shared, subject to their notification settings. In Lightning Experience, that email is not sent. If your adoption program relies on authors knowing when their content spreads, account for this gap. You may need a different signal, such as asking people to mention the author or to comment on the original when they share something worth flagging.
Sharing to a group, your profile, or a link
Sharing to a group is the most common path. You can share a post to a public Chatter group, and you must be a member of the group you pick. The shared post appears in that group's feed and links back to the original, where the comments live. You can add your own note when you share, which is useful for explaining why the post matters to that particular group. Sharing to your profile sends the post to your followers. In the Share menu you choose My Followers, optionally add a comment, and confirm. This is how an individual amplifies a post to the people who already pay attention to their activity, without needing access to a specific group. Sharing a link is the narrowest option. You open the link to the post, copy it, and send it through email or an instant message. The catch is that the recipient has to be a Chatter user in your org to open it. A link is not a public web URL. It is an internal pointer that respects Chatter access. Use it when one specific person needs to see a post and a group share would be overkill or too noisy.
What you cannot share, and why
Share has real boundaries, and they exist to protect record-level and group-level access. You cannot share posts from private groups, and you cannot share posts from private groups that include external users. Archived and unlisted groups are also off limits as destinations. The logic is that sharing must never widen visibility past the access controls of the original. If a post lives in a restricted space, surfacing it elsewhere would leak it. Some content types simply are not shareable at all. Feed-tracked items, which Salesforce generates automatically when a tracked field changes, cannot be shared. Neither can custom feed items such as approval requests, dashboard snapshots, or case interactions. These are tied to a specific record context, and lifting them into another feed would strip away the context that makes them meaningful. Posts that originate on a record feed also sit outside the simple Share flow. The Share action is built around user-authored posts that can stand on their own in a new audience. When the post is really a system event or a record-bound artifact, Salesforce keeps it anchored where it belongs rather than letting it float into unrelated feeds.
A worked example of resurfacing a win
Picture a support engineer who posts a clean fix for a tricky integration error in their team's Chatter group. The post explains the root cause, the steps to resolve it, and a link to the knowledge article. It is exactly the kind of content other teams would want, but they do not follow that group, so they never see it. Instead of asking the engineer to rewrite the post somewhere else, a team lead uses Share. They open the post, choose Share with a group, and pick a broader Engineering group they belong to. They add a short note: this resolved the recurring webhook timeout, worth a read. The post now appears in the wider group, linking back to the original. Anyone who wants to ask a follow-up question clicks through and comments on the source, so the whole discussion stays in one place. If the lead were on Classic, the attached log file would travel with the share. On Lightning, only the post would move, and readers would click through to the original to grab the file. Either way, one good post reaches a far larger audience with two clicks, and the engineer who wrote it still owns the canonical thread.
Treating Share as a signal, not noise
Share is powerful precisely because it is cheap. Two clicks push a post to a much larger audience. That same ease is what turns Chatter into noise when people overuse it. A feed full of indiscriminate shares trains everyone to scroll past, which defeats the point of the feature. The healthiest Chatter cultures treat a share as a small editorial act. You are vouching that this post deserves a wider read. When you audit Chatter adoption, look at who is doing the sharing. If the same two or three power users account for nearly every share, the behavior has not spread, and the broader population is treating Chatter as read-only. A range of people sharing a range of content is a better sign that the platform is actually part of how the company communicates. Pair Share with the rest of the collaboration toolkit. Follow decides whose posts reach you in the first place. Topics tag posts so they are findable later. Groups give content a home scope. Share is the lever that moves a single high-value post from its home scope out to the people who would otherwise never stumble across it.
How to share a Chatter post
Sharing a Chatter post takes a few seconds from the feed. The exact wording differs slightly between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic, and Lightning shares only the post while Classic carries files and attachments too. These steps cover the common path of sharing a post to a wider audience.
- Find the post
Locate the post you want to resurface in any Chatter feed you can see. The post must be a user-authored post, not a feed-tracked item or a custom item like an approval, dashboard snapshot, or case interaction.
- Click Share
On the post, click the Share action. In Lightning Experience it sits with the post's other actions, and the menu lets you choose Share with a group or My Followers.
- Choose a destination
Pick where the post should go. For a group, you must be a member and the group must be public, not private with external users, archived, or unlisted. For your profile, choose My Followers.
- Add context and share
Optionally type a short note explaining why the post matters to this audience, then confirm. The shared post appears in the chosen feed and links back to the original, where the comments stay.
Sends the post into a public Chatter group you belong to. Best for putting a post in front of a whole team or topic-based audience.
Shares the post to your profile so the people who follow you see it. Best for individual amplification without a specific group.
Generates an internal link you can paste into email or instant message. The recipient must be a Chatter user in your org to open it.
- In Lightning Experience the share carries only the post. Attachments, comments, and likes are not included, so readers click through to the original for those.
- You cannot share posts from private groups, private groups with external users, or archived and unlisted groups, because sharing must not widen visibility past the original access.
- Classic emails the original poster when their post is shared; Lightning Experience does not send that notification, so authors may not know their content spread.
- Editing the original of a shared post in Lightning Experience updates the shared version automatically, since both point at the same underlying post.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Share a Chatter PostSalesforce
- Share a Chatter Post with a GroupSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Sharing, Chatter.
- Share a Chatter Post to Your ProfileSalesforce
- Share a Link to a Chatter PostSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Sharing, Chatter.
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.
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