Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
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Oracle Social Cloud (legacy)
Score 7.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Oracle Social Cloud helped marketers to discover, analyze, and respond across paid, owned and earned social channels to measure the impact of their data-driven campaigns. Oracle Social Cloud is a legacy product, and no longer available for sale.
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.
It's well suited if you are in a situation where you need control of the content that is published out to your channels. It provides complete trackability for every action taken by each member of staff when working with the system so you can always know who was overall responsible for any decision that was made. It's less suited to small businesses that have limited social media presence. It is very slow on being kept up to date with the native platform and the lack of ability to schedule the same post multiple times is frustrating
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.
Ease of reporting. Allows us to pull reports by network or by campaign quickly. This used to be a manual process that would take upwards of 8 hours per month.
Real-time social media monitoring, with virtually no spam. Other providers struggle to remove spam content from their social monitoring results which makes sifting through mentions cumbersome.
Integration into other tools. Being able to integrate other Oracle products like Eloqua and web analytics like Omniture helps us see social media content as part of our larger pipeline now.
Tabs tool could be much more user friendly, i.e. completely "drag and drop". It was pretty easy to get something functional built, but if you didn't know how to code CSS then you were pretty much hopeless when it came to making the tab look "professional".
Their bulk uploading/scheduling feature for posts was always having issues, it was something I always wanted to take advantage of and was bummed that it didn't really work well enough to make it efficient.
When I was using the tool, it was a very janky user experience when you needed to go and locate a post or comment that had been automatically removed due to keyword filters. And there was no simple way to just view a stream of what's being said on/to your accounts.
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.
Our personal support finally came back at the end of our contract, but their product just could not offer what the competition offered. Social media is moving fast, and you need to work with companies that understand that and are at the forefront of trends, you can't get stuck with a company that is standing still.
The personalized support of a single individual who gets to know your business and your needs is priceless. They will assist with anything from a technical glitch to a campaign strategy that has worked for other companies
Vitrue's training was limited online and not very in-depth, but the the platform is overall very easy to use and doesn't necessarily need a large amount of training.
We started our social marketing journey by just using the free version of Hootsuite. It had good listening but was limited in other areas, especially as it related to campaign tracking and some analytics. Even looking at the Enterprise versions, we didn't feel it had the breadth of functionality as Oracle SRM.
Audience. Before SRM, we had 1,000 Likes on Facebook. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, our Likes have grown to 20,000.
Frequency. Before SRM, we posted once a week on Facebook & Twitter. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, we now post 54 times a month, or about twice a day on weekdays.
Internal acceptance. Before SRM, social was considered "a hobby" by senior management. Now, social marketing is a key part of the strategy of every product launch. That is due to the hard work of our social marketing manager, of course, but her efforts were amplified by SRM.
