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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SmarterQueue
Score 8.3 out of 10
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SmarterQueue is an intelligent social media scheduling tool that aims to empower marketers, content creators, and entrepreneurs with the technology and capabilities they need to grow their businesses and careers. The vendor states it: Sparks conversations that fuel growth. Helps users reclaim time and regain freedom while posting more consistently and driving revenue. Is a social media scheduling platform for every use case. Personal Brands…
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.
It's a great platform that can easily schedule posts, and create evergreen posting by creating queues with different categories of posts. SmarterQueue allows you to create a range of content categories (tips, updates, quotes, images, videos, promotions, stories, case studies, etc) and choose where to post the various categories of content so you don't blast all your channels with the same content (have content specific channels). The interface is very clean, easy to use, and simple to navigate through, and has an AI assistant to help you create content and content variations. What I like the most creating an evergreen queue to which I can simply keep adding new content to and the posting is taken of.
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.
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.
SmarterQueue is more comprehensive, has more features for cheaper subscriptions, and more flexible price plans to suit your business needs, whether you want to scale down or scale up. The user-friendly interface enabled a very quick learning curve for myself and for my virtual assistant. Better UI design and layout, clean, simple, intuitive to use and navigate through, and does the job well.
