Khoros Social Media Management vs. Livefyre (discontinued)

While I cannot say any scenarios where Khoros wouldn't be useful (when it comes to social media moderation), I can say it is very well suited for clients who have time constraints on their work. With the speed Khoros can pull in new content, we see issues for the client almost immediately.

Incentivized

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.

• Reporting is great - easy to create bespoke dashboards for multiple ways to view the data and trends in platform
• Onboarding and training - a good repository of knowledge articles for users to access on most aspects of the platform for self-learning
• The user-friendly and intuitive interface allows any user to quickly assimilate how to use the platform.

Incentivized

• It's pretty flexible. There were only a few things we found that were too specific to our environment and could not be easily done.
• The out-of-the-box GUI design was decent. It was also configurable with limited custom CSS, anticipating the need for each company to customize the look and feel to suit their own needs.
• Basic interface is good, providing the necessary data points like total comment count. Visual effects are good too, with fade-in effects for new comments.
• They also provide back-end APIs to gather information about the "hottest" threads. We used this to construct our own "Hot Topics" section that could link users to the related article so they could comment themselves.
• Good support, even after implementation. They were always available by phone and even through realtime IM chats direct to their developers, skipping awkward non-technical middlemen.

• Look and feel of the interface could use a refresh as it's not very exciting to use
• Improve analytics features and accuracy
• Facilitate bulk actions
• Better alerts/visibility of collaborative actions and assigned tasks
• Clearer communication around new feature releases and announcements

• Obviously we all want it all free! So make it all free and woohoo!
• A complaint about the price point leaps is that they are pretty steep, goes from free to pricey real fast.
• The comment management tools although easy and fast are a bit limited.

There is no product like Khoros. Our company lives and dies by the analytics, and to date, we have not seen a more comprehensive analytics structure for any social media management tool. Khoros support is also fantastic, responding and resolving any and all questions, ideas, or complaints, usually in 24 hours.

We are planning to continue using Livefyre comments on several of our blog properties due to its simplicity, transparency and speed of operation. We are actively researching it's more advanced features for some other platforms that need higher end results. Keep up the good work Livefyre.

Khoros Marketing is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The calendar visibility is the view I use most so I can see all posts going out on all of our channels. It allows us to time posts in a proper cadence so we don't overlap with other pressing content.

Incentivized

It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.

Incentivized

I don’t think we’ve experienced any unplanned downtime in the short time we’ve licensed the tool. In a few cases, we’ve encountered bugs but they were not critical and were resolved in a timely manner.

Khoros has greatly improved the performance of its SaaS products in the last 5 years. Their applications, including Conversations, Intelligence, and Experiences, all load quickly with real-time data. This performance is critical to provide meaningful, social customer support, and marketing. The performance maintains integrity even when you deploy powerful integrations like Salesforce Customer Relationship Manager.

Someone is almost always available and responds very quickly to any issues or concerns. Customer service is one of their best features and we have never had an issue. They take their time making sure you understand what you are working with and are available via email or phone to walk you through any issues.

Incentivized

From purchasing to implementation, the customer service/support was really perfect!

Incentivized

• As a very early customer, we did not undergo formal training but worked closely with the team to get the system set up to do what we wanted. However, online training resources are now available with many blog posts / video lessons and tutorials.

it is important to note that my perspective is not necessarily common - I'm a geek/nerd/poweruser in general, so I found the online resources to be more than adequate (and often very aesthetically pleasing, too). That said, a less "geeky" person might struggle a bit.

The implementation team from Khoros were great - they worked hard to understand our somewhat complex organization, and were with us all the way through face to face meetings, user training, and technical training. We had a clearly defined account manager and implementation manager, who worked really effectively together and with us.

Incentivized

On some accounts that I am on, I use Asana in place of Khoros marketing but I much prefer Khoros Marketing. I prefer Khoros Marketing over Asana because I can post directly (and schedule posts) on Khoros but not on Asana. Also, I can moderate directly on Khoros but not Asana

I used Disqus about 5-6 years ago, but I've wanted to try the Livefyre app, and it was really quite a good experience for me.

Incentivized

Khoros seems to struggle a little past a certain level of scale. More than 30 separate per day makes it difficult to view all content in the weekly calendar view, which is frustrating and could cause issues. However, the ability to schedule one post across multiple channels is hugely valuable and cuts down on a lot of duplicative work.

• Negatively impacted relationship with Khoros as they're notoriously difficult to engage with or able to produce viable results from our feedback.
• Negatively impacted KPI reporting, as metrics were inaccurate for six months.
• Negatively impacted resource management, as there've been so many restrictions with this platform that simple, day-to-day tasks take so much longer.

Incentivized

• The heavy work is already done given that we take the time to implement.
• Very useful insights and AI powered delivery.

Incentivized