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A Winner at Analytics, Khoros Fails at UI and Social CRM
October 25, 2013

A Winner at Analytics, Khoros Fails at UI and Social CRM

Christina Hadly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

  • Content labels (tracking what types of content does particularly well, based on labels the user defines).
  • Detailed analytics for individual posts as well as entire initiatives or platforms.
  • Notifying users when content deadlines are approaching or draft posts aren't approved for publishing.
  • User interface. The UI looks like it's from the '90s, and is not intuitive for new users. It is, however, better than the Hootsuite UI, in my opinion. On a sliding scale, Hootsuite has the most antiquated UI, Khoros's is outdated but the tools are at least useful, and newer aesthetically pleasing tools like Sprout Social have the best UI.
  • Editorial calendar display style. The calendar of upcoming and past posts is a good idea, in theory, but in practice, the calendar is extremely slow to load, skips weeks or months at a time when scrolling, and makes it hard to find the specific day or post you're looking for.
  • Publishing process. Since the tool does use an editorial calendar to track all upcoming posts, the tool should let users click on a day that doesn't have content scheduled and allow users to post directly to that day. Instead, you have to pick a day/time without having any indication of whether posts are already scheduled for that day/time. You can reference the editorial calendar that's open in the background, but given the calendar's scrolling issues, this is not practical or efficient.
  • Our team uses social media to increase brand awareness. Khoros has helped us achieve and measure our progress towards this goal. Content labels allowed us to track which content performed best. Knowing this enabled us to tailor future content and write posts that followers actually wanted to read and share, which then increased our social media following organically by thousands of users over the past year.
  • Our Khoros account reps worked with us personally to perform an in-depth analysis of our social media followers. We now know who our key brand advocates and influential followers are.
  • During our company's annual conference, Khoros's monitoring tools were invaluable for tracking mentions of the company and the conference. The tool also helped us track visits to the company website from social posts, which helped prove to executive leadership the value of social media.
Depending on the colleague's needs, I probably would not recommend Khoros. There are other, easier-to-understand tools with better UI and better social CRM functions. I would only recommend Khoros if the colleague really needed content labels to track which content performs best or if they wanted a devoted product support team to help them segment and analyze social media followers.

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

At the company that uses Khoros, I don't make the purchasing decisions, so our Khoros contract will undoubtedly be renewed. However, I also manage another company's social media presence, and I do make the purchasing decisions there. When transitioning them away from Hootsuite, I didn't even consider Khoros because I don't like their UI or calendar features. Instead, I purchased the tool SproutSocial, which has a much better UI, is more intuitive, and incorporates social CRM features. SproutSocial easily tracks mentions of your company name and brand keywords, then funnels them into one integrated inbox. Khoros insists on separating things into "streams", and doesn't really allow you to funnel social mentions to customer service or sales teams.