Everything a community manager needs to create and manage content.
May 03, 2014
Everything a community manager needs to create and manage content.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Percolate
In 2013, we made the decision to split out social publishing tools into social care, and social content.
As part of this split, we migrated off Hootsuite and into Sparkcentral and Percolate.
Percolate is our central content publishing platform where we manage our content, plan upcoming content, find new content for our brand, manage all of our multimedia assets, and manage a central content planning calendar for all of the outbound channels a social media manager usually takes care of. In our care, this means events, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and our blog. Additionally, Percolate interfaces seamlessly with our corporate Wordpress blog, allowing content to be published not just to the usual social channels, but also to the blog. This greatly reduces the amount of work required to push create, edit and publish our content. It also allows us to create blog content, and immediately schedule sharing the post in social.
As part of this split, we migrated off Hootsuite and into Sparkcentral and Percolate.
Percolate is our central content publishing platform where we manage our content, plan upcoming content, find new content for our brand, manage all of our multimedia assets, and manage a central content planning calendar for all of the outbound channels a social media manager usually takes care of. In our care, this means events, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and our blog. Additionally, Percolate interfaces seamlessly with our corporate Wordpress blog, allowing content to be published not just to the usual social channels, but also to the blog. This greatly reduces the amount of work required to push create, edit and publish our content. It also allows us to create blog content, and immediately schedule sharing the post in social.
- The Percolate Brew feature has a human powered "learning" tool that learns about the kind of content our brand publishes. Using that, it provides tips and sources for new content. Each morning, we receive a list of content from around the world that is relevant to our brand and worth sharing with our own audience.
- The ability to create one piece of content, and then customize it for our various channels is a real time saver. We can write an article, then easily create a shorter version for Twitter, or a more B2B focussed piece for LinkedIn.
- Percolate helps our content creators decide when to post content - its posting schedule tool makes sure you don't overpost, but can also intelligently decide on a better time to post something based off past results.
- 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).
- The biggest ROI here is saving time. We no longer need to create our content, then figure out the best ways to get it onto our various platforms. One person can manage a piece of (internal or externally created content) and push it out to multiple channels.
- We also no longer need to rely on third party tools to track results of our content. As soon as content is published, we can learn how well it is doing, and learn from trends in our content publishing strategy.
- sprinklr,Sprout Social,HootSuite Enterprise
The main features that attracted us to Percolate were the editorial calendar and the multimedia database. Additionally, the ability to take content beyond the usual social channels and interface with Wordpress AND bring in (paid) third party content made the purchase choice easy. Based off our decision to split support and content, Percolate offered the best value for money. Additionally, Percolate has been affordable - there is no limit to the number of users, we get top tier support included and we have a team at Percolate always working on brand success.
Percolate Implementation Rating and Lessons
- Vendor implemented
- Implemented in-house
Yes - The first step after signing the contract involved online questionnaires to learn about our brand. We explained who we are, provided search terms and described search terms for competitors. We also described the kind of content we feel suits our brand.
The next phase involved learning about the visuals of our brand. We provided color charts, fonts and logo files. This allowed Percolate to customize parts of the service to talk like our brand would if we were publishing manually. Editing tools now have our colors built in, the daily "brew" which suggests content to share is designed around search terms that appeal to our brand.
In the final phase, Percolate pulled in all of our past content and added those images to our media database.
The next phase involved learning about the visuals of our brand. We provided color charts, fonts and logo files. This allowed Percolate to customize parts of the service to talk like our brand would if we were publishing manually. Editing tools now have our colors built in, the daily "brew" which suggests content to share is designed around search terms that appeal to our brand.
In the final phase, Percolate pulled in all of our past content and added those images to our media database.
Change management was minimal - Our social team consists of three people so change management was quite minimal and after some very brief training,we were all up and running.
- Percolate continues to pull in content posted outside itself - we see support Tweets monitored inside Percolate that were posted by our care team with a different tool. This made tracking down results of Percolate generated content harder.