Crowdbooster (discontinued) vs. Cyfe, by Traject

Before recommending Crowdbooster, I'd want to know what goals they hope to accomplish with the software. Then I would want them to specifically identify what types of metrics would be most useful to their program. If they specifically need to report out on how many people in a certain location they reached, this isn't the right fit. If they are using other tools, there may be duplication. However, if they are currently using more budget-friendly solutions or just getting started with a new program, Crowdbooster is a perfect fit. It will help you to grow your program and is flexible enough to accommodate your needs.

Cyfe might be for you if you are looking for a cost-effective way to display all of your marketing metrics in one place. If you are looking for a detailed, fine-tuned, niche, or extremely specific metrics, this might not be the best solution. Cyfe is good for a general health check-up of marketing, but not a finely tuned examination.

• Timed social media posts - Crowdbooster provides the opportunity to schedule social media posts allowing you to work on other important social media tasks.
• Simply beautiful tracking - There are millions of ways to measure social media impact. Crowdbooster offers the most important and relevant measurements in simplified charts..
• Great UI - Crappy UI = crappy experience. Crowdbooster's UI is easy to navigate. It won't take months to learn where all the buttons are.

• Has preset metric groups that pull similar stats together in one "bucket" saving you the time of setting up each stat-line one by one
• Allows you to easily adjust the timeframe for what stats you want to see, so you can find YOY stats or just last month's stats rather quickly
• Colored visualizations of stats make it easy to notice when campaigns are taking off

• The ranked order of twitter followers and the number of "tweet impressions" did not help that much. Those "tweet impressions" were not really an estimate of how many people were actually reading my tweet. It was simply a sum of followers of the person retweeting a tweet and the sum of all followers from a subsequent retweet of the initial retweet. All this told me was the best case scenario I could expect if ALL followers of a person that retweeted saw my tweet. This is not a true measure of "twitter footprint" – since the “signal to noise” ratio in Twitter is very low.
• There was no system in place to track "clicked links" for links embedded in tweets and/or facebook wall posts. Hootsuite did a good job of this – but only for twitter.
• The list of recommended times to tweet were always "on the hour" (i.e. 10 a.m, 1 p.m.). Never were the times ever at "half past the hour" etc. An independent study that I did on my own using Google Analytics (and campaign links using google's URL builder) helped me determine that my optimal "Tweet time" during the week is 3:30 p.m. ET. More importantly, the recommended times seemed to be roughly the same on the weekends - which I find strange given that social media behavior does change on the weekends.
• Occasionally, in my facebook ranked table of "loyal fans", I would see people in there that had not "liked" or "commented" on a post for months at a stretch and the "look back" period of the table was only around 7 days or so. Hence, I occasionally had to question the accuracy of that table.

• I'd love to see additional functionality to customize colors. The light/dark option is very nice, but a little more flexibility in the colors would go a long way, especially if it was possible at the dashboard level rather than just the account level. Along the same lines, being able to customize the charts a little more, for example being able to show an x-axis on single data type graphs, could make them easier to read in some cases.
• Being able to choose to report on converted clicks or conversions in AdWords would be helpful.
• Needs the ability to show the date range on the shared URL dashboards. Would be even better if the date range was adjustable on that view, too.

Simple to use and a great value for what it offers. It has a simple but clean interface and it provides fantastic historical data you can use to measure your efforts online. By using a tool like Crowdbooster, you can see what is working with your audience and what isn't. From there, you can start tweaking your strategies

It has become a part of our internal tools so unless a competitor comes out with similar functionality as a similar price point it is unlikely that we would not renew. One area that would cause us not to renew would be if a competing service came out with more third-party integrations that match our needs. Price at this point is no longer an issue as it would allow us to automate a somewhat manual process that we have now connecting Cyfe widgets to Google Sheets.

I found it fairly intuitive and easy to use. The information is laid out cleanly, and the most important information appears at a glance on the home page. However, I have worked with other users who had a hard time switching between platforms and identifying where other information was buried. It's not always clear that something is a clickable button! The option to export results is also a bit buried, and not integrated with the date range option.

I gave it a rating of 7 because it does a good job at what it does, but there are missing that are missing which I would have benefited from. For instance, if I was able to drill down more on the specific metrics I was able to see, that would have been helpful.

I do not think it is as supported as it once was when it first arrived on the social media scene. It is an older platform whose main functionality may have already ran its course.

Because I had a very minor question and I was able to speak directly to the founder through LinkedIn and through email. I know that as they grow this may not always be an option but the fact that he made himself available to answer my questions said a lot about his passion for the product.

If you can demo a free trial, that is definitely the best way to see if this will fit your program's specific needs.

Cyfe is a 15 minutes implementation, then some time to get your data sources created. This is an easy one person job that will not result in down time or unnecessary wasted man hours.

It is a platform that is singularly focused. It does not have a lot of the additions that come stock with other platforms such as robust reporting or deeper insights past schedule times. It is also a stand-alone platform and a lot of its primary functionality can be found in more encompassing platforms.

The Salesforce dashboard is comparably flexible and intuitive, but designed more to its internal CRM focus. SumAll shares the social media dashboard capabilities, but lacks all others. Its interesting feature is side-by-side graph analysis for cross-channel performance. Cyfe might borrow from SumAll's default weekly email summary of performance from the dashboard, but implementation could be too complex. Nuvi dashboard is exclusively for social media marketing, but lacks Cyfe's flexibility for third party integration and window customization settings.

• Increased efficiency. I am able to generate useful snapshot reports in seconds. Particularly useful when you need answers fast (such as on a phone call).
• Peace of mind. I am able to compare the data in Crowdbooster to what is exported from Facebook and Twitter.
• Quicker, simpler evaluation of results. I am able to more easily compare impressions with engagement data to see what is working, and what should change. Particularly useful in day-to-day analysis.

• Cyfe allows us to provide real time data to our clients
• Cyfe allows us to provide detailed analytics to our clients showing actual results
• Cyfe reduced our need to provide monthly "reports" to our marketing clients
• Cyfe allows us to have better situational awareness and know what is going on throughout our multiple organizations