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,…
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.
If you have a lot of clients whom have a strong social media presence, then RebelMouse would be a good option for you. It helps streamline all of your social media posts, so that everyone can be on the same page. Pretty cool stuff. It's even good for your own company (we played with it for a while). I would highly recommend anybody looking to create consistency in their social media campaigns to use RebelMouse
RebelMouse is actually open to almost any concept of building your layout. They offer a number of templates as well as the ability to use your own custom layout. Since I'm picky with that kind of stuff, that really appeals to me.
Hosting is super simple. Like, it's as simple as signing up and creating as many sites as you would like with unlimited bandwidth and either a custom URL – which is something I really appreciate.
The platform was built for marketing, It takes all these different approaches of reaching people and makes them easier to use simultaneously all in one feed. Super cool stuff.
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.
Initially setting up automation is confusing, and not easily explained through their site – especially if you want to streamline everything in your feed. In a nutshell they need to walk you through some things when you're starting up, and they just don't do that.
There's a lack of intuitive design that can also be confusing to people just starting out. Took me a while to shift through some tabs before I found my footing in the program – and i'm fairly tech savvy!
The company's website isn't exactly intuitive, and can turn away customers. Some people in my work have even visited the site and walked away from it actually confused as to what the service provides. Poor user interface on that part.
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.
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.
There's really not a program like RebelMouse, at least not in my experience. This program has helped us immensely with our social media presence (as I've been praising in this review). I would highly recommend it. If there's a better program out there, I have yet to hear about it
