Pleasantly surprised by Khoros' capabilities
February 19, 2018
Pleasantly surprised by Khoros' capabilities
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Conversations
- Intelligence
- Experiences
Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
While we initially bought Khoros for its community management capabilities (available in Conversations), since we've had the tool, we've come to discover the vast capabilities that Khoros also offers within Intelligence and Experiences. I've especially been impressed with Khoros' real-time listening capabilities and data visualizations. As our company is continually evolving to be more agile and efficient in our marketing efforts, Khoros has been helpful in allowing us to display meaningful social listening data to our greater organization in a digestible, friendly way to help us make marketing decisions.
- Real-time listening. Khoros allows you to look at both Twitter and Instagram data (separately) in real-time. This is most helpful when you're monitoring an event, for example in a war room setting, where you need to keep close tabs on the conversation about your brand, influencers, etc. I've found that it's also been very helpful if you're monitoring your brand on a screen that's public to your company, because you won't need to manually refresh the screen to keep the information updated -- Khoros will automatically update it for you.
- Social listening visualizations. I really am impressed by the various types of visualizations that Khoros offers.
- Providing support. Beyond having a great rep and support access via email, Khoros holds regular office hours 4 days/week for 1 hour/day, where any client can call into work with a trainer 1:1. These are sessions where any client can dial in, so you may have another person or two on the line asking questions too, but I've found these sessions to be highly valuable when I'm looking to solve for specific listening or reporting needs.
- Onboarding. Khoros offers a very user-friendly online tutorial for onboarding. We used this guided tutorial for Conversations, and it was a huge help in quickly getting us up and running with the tool.
- Publishing content. There are some things that cannot be published within Khoros (ex: gifs and canvas ads on Facebook). I was told that Khoros has made the business decision to invest more in paid analytics and performance reporting rather than execution/replication of Facebook Ads Manager. As we look to have our agencies publish content for our brands, for security reasons, it's really important that we have a simple solution for publishing within Khoros vs. handing over account passwords, so agencies can publish content natively.
- Khoros' mobile app. While the basic functionality is there, my team hasn't found that we can solely community manage from our phones, because the app doesn't allow us to take all actions that we can on desktop. For example, we cannot 1) hide/delete a post from our phone, 2) jump to our bookmark or add a bookmark, 3) the filters that you set up on your desktop do not follow to the app (nor can you set up filters on the app), 4) it's easier to accidentally assign a post to the wrong person/group on the app vs. desktop, 5) among other frustrations. We've provided this feedback to Khoros.
- Separate data. Khoros allows you to look at Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook (limited) data separately, but not together. Most brands are looking at a holistic view of their social listening and don't want to see the platforms segmented. I've requested that there's an option to view this data altogether.
Social media is very important to many of our brand's marketing and customer care efforts.
Khoros' Conversations has allowed our customer care and social media teams to more efficiently communicate with each other within the tool itself vs. needing to leave Khoros to send a separate email. We're able to assign posts to one another (and automatically send that person an email to alert them of the assigned post), which allows us to keep the documented communication regarding a specific user/post within Khoros and allows us to more quickly understand the situation and respond to our consumers.
We chose Khoros for its community management capabilities -- however, now that we have the tool and have explored it further, I have been pleasantly surprised by its listening and visualization capabilities.
I've utilized Khoros' office hours when trying to figure out the best way to use Khoros to get after a business need (ex: creating a competitive report or screens to show in a war room), and I found this service extremely helpful. I'm not familiar with Khoros' user groups or networks, but I attended their 2017 Smart Social Summit, and my team members and I found it to be a good conference!