After the August 2024 acquisition, Hearsay Systems joined Yext, combining Yext's digital presence management with Hearsay's compliant customer engagement tools.
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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.
Apart from a few limitations, Hearsay Social is an excellent tool for managing your social media posts in one place. Its user-friendly interface allows you to analyze, track, schedule, and automate social media posts. This is a must in today's age. It saves a lot of stress and handwork and makes you efficient as it gives you tools to analyze the results of your posts in terms of reach, viewership, etc. Thereby helping you to formulate your social media strategy.
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.
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.
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.
If you wish to reduce stress of managing multiple social media handles from a single place, you can use Hearsay Social. Hearsay Social helps you analyze, automate, schedule posts and even give ideas for posts. Rather than multitasking, one would obliviously choose a single place to track your posts. It also fares greatly as compared to its competitors. It has a great interface. Very easy and simple to use.
Facebook Business Manager is also good however it has some limitations like it's very difficult to remove an ad account, we cannot schedule shared posts and the user interface is a bit complicated and not user-friendly. I like the user interface of Hearsay Social. I find it very simple and easy to use. Also, it has all the features that you might require in Social Media Management tool.
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.
