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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Engagor (discontinued)
Score 6.8 out of 10
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Engagor was a Social Media Management platform with key features include monitoring of the social web, real-time customer engagement, workflow automation, analytics and reporting. The product was acquired by Clarabridge in 2015, and then Clarabridge was acquired by Qualtrics in October 2021. Engagor is no longer available.
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.
Engagor is a very powerful tool for customer care purposes to be able to engage in real-time with your customers. If there are a lot of messages coming in during important peaks throughout, we can easily answer them every 30 seconds. Engagor isn’t that fit to use for publishing. We mostly use Engagor to reply to messages in real-time. However, for scheduling posts in Engagor, we publish and schedule on the native platform instead.
Real-time mention tracking is a must these days. Quick responsiveness is critical on many social media platforms, especially on Twitter.
Fast and helpful support via Engagor chat and messages helps a LOT! I think the longest wait time was about 40 seconds for me. My workflow never gets disrupted because of idle sessions.
Automations can help you a lot. Automated "recipes" are great tools for decreasing your agents' workload, and there are many customizable settings for them.
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.
The UX is pretty clunky. Engagor only loads about 10 mentions per page, so if my team is behind on tagging/mention resolution by a couple of days, for a global brand that can mean an extra week of work. Would be much easier if the user could choose how many mentions show up on their screen.
Over the year we have had issues with Engagor's glitches. For example, the user has the capability to publish to a platform (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) through Engagor as the brand. For a couple of the brands we work on, Engagor would show the update as published as one brand, but would actually publish as another. As an agency that handles social media content/community management for several very large brands, we cannot afford to have accidental status updates despite the author's efforts. This happened several times over the course of our experience with Engagor, to a point that we had to forego this feature for those brands and publish natively through the platform.
It has definitely skewed reporting numbers more than once -- for a set time period (i.e. 30 days, our typical monthly reporting period), the stats for a platform will appear very different from how they display on the native platform itself. For example, on occasion Engagor would load numbers from a Facebook fan count during a 30-day period that did not at all match up with the numbers Facebook showed me. This also applies to the number of overall mentions of a brand/account.
There is no immediately clear "undo" feature when resolving a mention. There have been times I have bulk-tagged a set of mentions, set all as resolved and then realized that I had made an error, without a very clear way to revert that action.
Double mentions have shown up, skewing numbers and sentiment/tagging analytics.
The insights/reporting section could definitely be a little more clear in how it explains metrics (or why the user should care to report these metrics). While we have an analyst on our team who is happy to explain these terms, I can see how some of them would not be intuitive at all to a user who doesn't live and breathe social media analytics. Also, the line graphs can be very difficult to read and parse. If the user downloads a line graph to their desktop from Engagor, it doesn't necessarily show all of the information you need, making it necessary to screengrab rather than downloading a higher-quality visual.
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.
Both the tool and the support that we receive from the customer service department and the customer success manager makes me likely to renew the use of Engagor.
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.
Sprout Social is good for smaller accounts with limited traffic. Some insights available but often questionable data. Only picks up direct interaction (i.e. doesn't monitor likes or favourites). Sysomos was used for a while, but spent ages defining search times still producing questionable data. Did not properly monitor Facebook interaction and often did not pick up from that platform at all. Customer service only operated in US time (we are UK) which proved increasingly problematic
