Getting Started with Chatter

New to Chatter? Start here. These articles cover signing up, getting around, and the core concepts you’ll bump into as soon as you start using the tool.

In this guide

1. Signing up for Chatter
2. Your first day in Chatter
3. Navigating Chatter
4. Understanding tokens
5. Understanding relevancy scores

Signing up for Chatter

There are a few different ways to sign up for Chatter. Pick whichever fits your workflow — your account works the same either way.

Sign-up options

• Sign up with Google. The fastest path — one click and you’re in. Recommended if you already use Google for work.
• Sign up with LinkedIn. Another quick path!
• Sign up with email and password. Use this if you’d rather not link a Google or LinkedIn account.

After you sign up

Once your account is created, Chatter walks you through onboarding. You’ll tell us about your brand, your audience, the keywords you care about, and the competitors you want to track. This information powers everything Chatter does — the better you fill it in, the more relevant your stories and topics will be.

If you’re invited to an existing brand instance by an admin, you’ll skip brand setup and land directly in the dashboard.

Tips

• You can adjust any of your onboarding inputs later in Brand Settings — nothing is locked in.
• Sign-in method is tied to your account. You can’t swap between Google, LinkedIn, and email later. 

Your first day in Chatter

Here’s what to do in your first 30 minutes to get the most out of Chatter.

1. Visit Dash

Dash is our Dashboard and your home base. New users will see a Getting Started section that walks through the core features. It also shows competitor updates, your latest stories, team activity, and token usage at a glance.

2. Browse the Stories feed

Head to Stories to see what’s happening in your market right now. Stories are pulled from sources you selected during onboarding and matched to your brand, audience, and keywords. Right after onboarding, your initial batch of Stories will have a lower relevancy to your brand. This is the system trying to find some quick stories for your feed. A more in-depth matching is happening behind the scenes and should be in your feed within an hour or so.The feed updates frequently.

3. Train the system

As you browse, upvote stories you love and downvote stories that miss the mark. If a source consistently isn’t useful, remove it by clicking the three dots in the upper right corner of the story card. Chatter learns from these signals and improves your feed over time.

4. Create your first topic

Pick a few stories that spark an idea and click Select for Topic. They’ll appear in the Sandbox panel—on the right side on desktop, below the feed on mobile.   Configure the sandbox with a title, keywords, and a content type, then generate a draft topic you can run with. You can always edit, regenerate, or refine later.

Tips

• Allow a little time for Chatter’s system to fully process your sources and competitors after onboarding — it has a lot of indexing to do behind the scenes.
• Keep an eye on token usage in the dashboard, especially early on while you’re experimenting. 

Navigating Chatter

Chatter is organized around five main areas. Here’s a quick map of where to find things.

The five main areas

• Dash — your home base. See team activity, token usage, competitor updates, and recently created topics.
• Stories — the live feed of articles from across the web, filtered to your brand and audience.
• Topics — the library of content ideas you and your team have created. Edit, regenerate, discuss it with your team, and export from here.
• Wizard — a guided creative workspace for ideating from scratch with advanced search and a sandbox.
• Profile — where you manage your account, brand settings, users, billing, and notifications.

Always-on features

• The feedback button lives in the footer of every page. Use it to report bugs or send us suggestions.
• Notifications appear when teammates tag you, when topics are generated, and when you hit token thresholds you’ve set.

Understanding tokens

Tokens are how Chatter measures AI usage. Every time you ask Chatter to generate, suggest, or regenerate something, you spend tokens. Here’s what you need to know.

What uses tokens

• Generating a topic from selected stories
• Regenerating a topic, section, or highlighted text
• Asking Chatter to suggest a title
• Asking Chatter to suggest new stories for an existing topic
• Using the advance Story search in the Wizard
• Generating a draft in the Wizard

What doesn’t use tokens

• Browsing stories or topics
• Saving, upvoting, or downvoting stories
• Editing copy by hand inside a topic
• Tagging teammates or leaving comments
• Exporting a topic as PDF or Markdown

How much tokens you get

• Free plan — 20,000 tokens per month
• Pro plan — 40,000 tokens per month per seat

Tracking your usage

Your dashboard shows total token usage for your entire instance plus a breakdown by user. You can also set up token alerts in Settings — for example, get notified when you hit 25%, 50%, or 75% of your monthly quota.

Tips

• A typical topic regeneration uses around 2,000 tokens. Plan accordingly when you’re iterating heavily on a single topic.
• Guest users can browse and comment but cannot run any token-using actions. Use guest seats for stakeholders who need visibility, not creation.

Token Cost Reference

• Generating a topic from selected stories:~2,200-2,700 tokens
• Generating a draft Topic in the Wizard:~2,200-2,700 tokens
• Regenerating a topic, section, or highlighted text:~2,200-2,700 tokens
• Regenerating a portion of the body of a Topic: ~1,000-2,500 tokens (depending on how much is highlighted to regenerate.
• Asking Chatter to suggest a title:~150-250 tokens
• Using the advance Story search in the Wizard:~50-100 tokens
• Asking Chatter to suggest new stories for an existing topic:~25-75 tokens

Understanding relevancy scores

Every story Chatter shows you has a relevancy score — a percentage that reflects how well it matches your brand, audience, and keywords. Here’s how to read it and tune it.

How relevancy is calculated

Chatter combines several signals: your brand profile, target audience, keywords, solutions, and the sources you’ve selected. Each story is scored against all of these, then ranked. Stories that hit on more signals score higher.

Your relevancy threshold

Your relevancy threshold is the minimum score a story needs to appear in your feed. You can adjust it in Brand Settings.

• 30% (default) — broad feed, you’ll see lots of stories including some loosely related ones
• 50% (balanced) — fewer stories, all reasonably on-topic
• 70% (strict) — only the most precise matches, often very few stories

Choosing the right threshold

Most teams start at 30% and raise it once they have a sense of what good looks like for their brand. If you’re seeing too many stories that miss the mark, raise the threshold. If your feed feels thin, lower it.

70% is a high bar. At that level, a story essentially needs to read like something your own brand would publish. Use this only if your niche is very specific and you want a tightly curated feed.

Tips

• Upvoting and downvoting stories also influences what you see, on top of the relevancy threshold. Both work together to shape your feed.