Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and is now part of Adobe Experience Manager. Later versions of AEM include features of Livefyre pre-installed. Livefyre (or the Livefyre Studio app) is a content curation, social media UGC, audience engagement application that enables users to access user generated content that can be streamed in real-time to a customer’s sites, digital billboards, apps,…
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EveryoneSocial
Score 8.4 out of 10
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EveryoneSocial is a platform that connects employees and empowers them to authentically create and share content.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
It is our duty to distribute different content to our departments. It was hard to have control over every post on our different platforms. With EveryoneSocial, we have been able to even add social platforms where we did not have a presence before. With EveryoneSocial, we have had a better understanding of our target.
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
Leaderboards: I think it's great to have one, it's a strong motivator, but to my knowledge, there's no room for customizations/separate leaderboards the way there is for the different content streams. Seems like a no-brainer that each content stream/group should have its own leaderboard. With one general leaderboard, I've seen it actually discourage people from participating, b/c they see Joe Smith with over a thousand shares, etc. and feel like they'll never catch up, so why bother. Separate, customized leaderboards would be a right direction for this product. This is really one of the only areas I think this tool is really lacking in.
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
I gave it this rating because it is easy to use, creates positive competition between employees about who can have the most impact on the brand, engages others in a way we have not yet been able to duplicate and is very simple.
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
I consider that EveryoneSocial stacks up against other platforms since it has more complete and useful tools that we can use to acquire better results in productivity and time management. As well, it has been a very user-friendly platform. It was a smooth transition that worked for the best of everyone.
