Percolate was a content marketing platform designed to help large brands create content and manage marketing campaigns. The product's capabilities have been integrated into the Seismic platform's digital marketing capabilities, and Percolate is no longer available for sale standalone.
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Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Sysomos was a social media listening and marketing solution for content discovery, planning, publishing, moderation, and analytics. Sysomos was acquired by Meltwater, and is no longer available, but the features of the former Sysomos are now part of the Meltwater platform.
Very useful for the management, planning, and programming of all social networks, as well as marketing campaigns. One of the best tools to make life easier for community managers and automate daily tasks such as content publishing. It is my favorite for managing my clients' networks.
Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload
Ad-hoc research. During planning phase of a campaign it is a helpful tool to understand the marketplace, key influencers and topics that engage a target demographic.
Post-event hashtag analysis. Rapid generation of reporting on efficacy of a campaign, key voices, topics that resonated, viral reach and more.
User interface. Friendly and accessible enough to minimize training needs and enable decentralized access, though we have found some hand-holding is still required to get the most out of the platform.
A lot of the features in Percolate are very well built, but only provide the bare minimum as features go. Its editorial calendar for example lacks export/import features and its multimedia repository only supports images. In many ways, Percolate is trying very hard to be too much at the same time.
At the moment, Percolate lacks user level management. We can add users who need to be moderated before posting, but it is for example not possible to add users just for one specific function (like the multimedia database).
Percolate is a great tool for us, because we need the approval process workflows. The training was great when we first signed on, and the interface is very user friendly. We have trained our interns to use it as well with no issues. It makes keeping up with our content calendar a breeze and we can easily see what posts have been approved and which ones are still pending at a quick glance
There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.
The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction
Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."
Rarely has a company shown this much support during implementation. This almost got to the point where it was too much hand holding. Sometimes, social teams just want the keys to the car so they can drive it themselves instead of waiting on someone to drive along with them...
Percolate and Falcon have many similarities and provide many of the same features, however Percolate felt a bit more robust than Falcon, although it does come with a higher price tag to match. Both platforms are excellent for content approval workflows, content scheduling, and community management. Percolate offers additional features such as an Asset Management Library and a section for creative briefs and collaboration with internal teams.
We've used Sprout Social & Hootsuite in the past -- and they all stack up pretty evenly. Sysomos has the same features as Sprout or Hootsuite, except their reports and analytics are a little more detailed. Hootsuite has a better social media management software and dashboard though
