Follow Content, People, or Places

Following content, people, or places keeps them in your periphery by filling your Followed Activity stream with their activity only.

If you want to add awareness of content, people, or places to your Activity stream, then you need to follow them so they show up in your Followed Activity stream. Following ensures you can separate out a stream of content you have personally selected: in your Activity page, you can then toggle between All Activity and Followed to narrow down the stream. You can start following content, people, or places whenever you browse to them or when you open a profile or overview page. (If you want to know more about following and tracking, see Following vs Tracking: What's the Difference?.)

Tip: Browse the content, people, or places that your co-worker or someone with similar interests follows by going to their profile. This way you can quickly find things and people you should also follow.

Depending on your community's setup, you may have either friends or connections/followers. For communities set up with a "Friends" model, friends share a two-way relationship: the two users are connected to each other. For communities set up with a "Connections" model, connections/followers have a one-way relationship: User A follows User B, but User B does not have to follow User A. By default, if your community is an internal one, you are already following your colleagues--people at the same level in your org chart. (You can see your place in the org chart by clicking your name and then clicking View Org Chart next to your title.)

If you follow a lot of activity, for example busy groups or people, you may find that it's easier to set email notifications on individual pieces of content rather than enabling email for all followed activity. To change this, click the arrow next to your name at the top right of the community, select Preferences, and set People, places and content I'm following (Followed Activity) to notify you about followed content either in digest format, or never. You can still see your Followed content in the Activity page.

To set up following so you see the activity that interests you:

Go to a piece of content, a person's profile, or a place. You can use the Browse menu or search. For more on this, see Find Stuff You Need.
Tip: When you browse to a list of content or places, you can click the gear icon to the right of any item to follow it without clicking through to the item. This helps you quickly follow multiple items of interest.
Click the Follow button to the right. Follow should now say Following.
Check your Followed Activity stream to see updates about what and who you're following.
If you want to stop following activity, return to a followed person, place, or content item and click Following. The button will change to say Follow and you will no longer see updates about that activity in your Followed stream.