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.
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PromoRepublic
Score 7.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
PromoRepublic is a social media marketing solution with content distribution workflows for small businesses, agencies, franchise and multi-location brands. Their products allow users to distribute editable content, schedule it based on AI, manage multiple clients or locations, run local ads, and stay on top of the results. According to the vendor, key capabilities include: AI-driven scheduling to the main social media networks Library with 100,000 posts…
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.
In terms of well suited for our business, it saves a good amount of time focusing on other tasks instead of sitting on one task alone for a long time. For less appropriate scenarios, if a keyword search would give the best result, that would help to even save more time. But great and good going.
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.
The user interface is very straight forward and easy to use. They also make it incredibly simple edit premade post ideas as well as create your own. You can connect all of the basic social media platforms which makes it great for individuals looking to streamline their scheduling process to get more content out
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.
Ultimately I selected PR because I was able to get it for a one-time cost rather than a subscription, but now that I'm used to it I couldn't imagine life without it. I've only used the free versions of the other platforms, so my experience with PR is obviously superior. However, there is absolutely nothing about PR that would make me consider switching to an alternative.
Consistency is key and having PromoRepublic has helped fill in the gaps when I don't have original content ready. The consistency has helped increase our engagement.
