Echobox is a social media publishing solution designed to understand the meaning of content using in-built AI. With automation that tailors to the user's business, Echobox is designed to share the right content with the right audience at the optimal time, to drive more traffic, higher engagement and greater revenue from social media and emails. Echobox is an automation platform boasting users among more than 2000 brands worldwide, including Newsweek, CNBC, The Guardian,…
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Livefyre (discontinued)
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
Echobox Social is well suited to publishers and media organisations who are publishing daily online content that needs sharing across social platforms. It works best if your social media objective is driving traffic to your articles/website. It would be suitable for both small and large organisations, as it allows multiple users with different access.
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.
Echobox automation is invaluable; the fact that it can intelligently automatically schedule articles within seconds of these being published on our website saves us a huge amount of time
I find the AI message option particularly useful when rescheduling content. Although it does not always pick out the best quote, most of the time it does a good job and again saves a lot of time
Having the option to schedule content immediately as well as in a specific time-slot or day is also very useful
Since I'm Brazilian, and our whole team is based in Brazil, would be great if the whole platform was translated for Portuguese. There are no many English speakers in Brazil, to be honest. That would make it easier
Tik Tok. Would be nice if somehow Echobox could provide their AI for Tik Tok Users
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.
Because I am totally satisfied with Echobox service. I find it balanced between the service itself and its cost. Compared to its competitors, it is, without a doubt, the best product for small publishers. It only lacks in a greater and more efficient management of statistics which, at the moment, is absent. I will definitely renew Echobox!
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.
Echobox Social's user interface is straightforward to navigate and even members of our team who are not necessarily social media specialists can step in when needed. The schedule queue is very easy to understand, meaning different team members can see what content is scheduled to be posted. When trying to edit the automation settings, each feature is well explained if you hover over the question mark button.
When there have been problems, they’ve usually been resolved very quickly. Some issues have occurred such as not being able to download images or posts not going out when the service has crashed, but they’re also very open to feedback. The option to download pictures loaded into the feed stories was my suggestion; saving us time creating new images and getting the posts out quickly
Echobox AI function (the ability to decide when is the best time to share a post) is a [game-changer] and also the UI is cleaner and easier to use. I found Hootsuite confusing and complicated. It has too many windows and also doesn't pull the articles automatically. There is no comparison really, Echobox is miles ahead.
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.
