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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Oktopost
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Oktopost empowers B2B enterprise and mid-market companies across Tech, Financial Services, Healthcare and other sectors to adopt a data-driven approach to social media marketing. Oktopost's social media management, social listening, and employee advocacy solutions enable B2B organizations to amplify their brand on social and measure the real impact of social on the business. Oktopost aims to enable marketers to better engage with customers and prospects, get actionable insights, and…
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.
Oktopost is great if you have several Social Media profiles you want to manage and want to schedule and post all your things in a simple interface. They have a great calendar view that shows everything that is coming up and you can easily move or change postings with a few clicks. It is also good for managing a single account. It has all the features I need for our single account markets, like campaigns, tracking, scheduling, etc. I think if you are trying to manage a very large number of social media profiles it might get a bit difficult. There are tools more suited for that than Oktopost that may be easier, but Oktopost would still work.
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.
Sometimes there were bugs in the user experience, but they seemed to be quickly addressed.
They didn't seem to have experience dealing with large-scale company use when integrating with Eloqua information. We had a lot of issues with false data or form submits showing up.
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 give Oktopost a 9, as a 10 means NO improvement is needed, but all platforms must iterate and improve. Hands down Oktopost is the B2B marketing leader in the social and content marketing world. They are also very quick to work on things and make the experience better for users. I would say I was a very early adopter of Oktopost and have seen them grow into a very useful tool and also a great company! I am VERY excited to see what they will do next to make our B2B marketing jobs more efficient and results producing! Thanks for helping our business close 10 accounts from LinkedIn in the last year! And that is up from ZERO the year before NOT using Oktopost.
When I have sent in questions to support, I have received answers pretty quickly and they were helpful. However, I would like to see more information on the support page rather than having to contact them directly.
As I stated earlier, I would suggest doing a quick session with the Oktopost team in order to properly set up the account and make sure you are getting the full experience.
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.
The integration with SalesForce and Marketo was the number one reason we went with Oktopost. It wasn't until after I got inside and got my hands dirty that I saw how great Oktopost was. The analytics reporting is sensational. It allowed me to easily pull reports to organize for my marketing department.
Ability to quickly and comprehensively provide metrics on all activities to internal users and external clients helps inform and direct immediate and long term posting decisions.
Ability to integrate with websites and marketing platforms allows for an understanding of user interest beyond the awareness arena and into the conversion arena.
Ability to quickly post allows for immediate input during time sensitive social discussions.
