TrustRadius Insights for Percolate, now part of Seismic are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Recommendations
Users frequently advise thoroughly learning Percolate to take full advantage of its numerous features that simplify tasks. They recommend investing time in the analytics tool, which might be challenging at first but proves invaluable once a customized dashboard is established.
Another common recommendation is to involve the IT team during transition or onboarding. Users suggest close collaboration with Percolate's engineering team and careful workflow mapping before committing to a contract due to certain software limitations.
Many users also propose exploring alternative options like Sprout or Hubspot combined with quality Photoshop capabilities and stock image subscriptions. They recommend using another tool for Instagram posting as Percolate lacks this functionality.
Percolate by Seismic is a tool my company used to increase marketing efficiency and channel effectiveness. It enabled us to create campaigns and promote products through distinct customer segments. The tool also provides a good insight into analytics and data, and provided us with multiple graphs and visualisations to identify potential issues.
Pros
Visualization
Campaigns
Cons
Screen layout
Likelihood to Recommend
Our company had to develop a marketing campaign about a customer's product. We used Percolate as it took into account every aspect: span teams, channels, products and geographies. We were also able to automate certain actions which turned out be time saving and cost-efficient. Furthermore, the use of data visualisations has been useful to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Product Management (Education Management company, 501-1000 employees)
We use Percolate for the Marketing and eCommerce team, primarily for campaign planning, digital asset management, and social publishing.
Pros
Campaign organization and planning
Process management for creative creation
Social publishing
Social analytics
Cons
As our internal processes have changed, it’s challenging to go back and rethink how to manage a process with the updates available.
Percolate no longer supports social listening.
You can export marketing campaigns in PDF format, but not in Word. They need to be converted.
Likelihood to Recommend
We originally purchased Percolate as a replacement for our social publishing tool. The fact that it came with built in campaign creation management tools was an added bonus. I would say most groups don’t focus much effort or resources on the planning piece, but it’s well worth it.
Percolate is being used by our marketing department to create marketing plans, share files, sync information, create a social content calendar, and manage social accounts. Right now we have about 7 people on our team using it. It helps us stay organized and it really helps us keep track of our marketing assets.
Pros
It has a great visual calendar.
Works well for team members of all different job types
Really understands the needs of a social publishing platform
Cons
The file management system is pretty good but there is always room for improvement. Searching for items can be tricky when you have a large library
Search in general could be better. I would love to search through social posts I made using the verbage in the post.
Sometimes making a simple post requires so many clicks.
Likelihood to Recommend
Percolate is great for a team that is constantly creating new marketing plans that need to be shared with lots of people. It is also very useful for a social media manager that likes to see all their content on a beautiful calendar. It is way more than you need if you are just looking for something to schedule social content with.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (Retail company, 201-500 employees)
We use Percolate in the marketing department of my company for all social media planning and posting. It is only used by our department but we manage all the social profiles for the company. The insurance industry has a lot of red tape and we have to send all marketing materials for legal compliance approval so the approval workflow feature in Percolate allows us to create and schedule social posts and send them through an approval process right in the program.
Pros
Approval workflow feature is simple and easy to use.
The calendar feature is great because it allows us to see everything we have approved and ready to go for a particular week or month.
Creating and scheduling posts is simple and the interface is easy to use.
Cons
We have had a lot of trouble with the images previewing correctly when we are in the approval workflow. Even when they are sized down correctly, they take forever to load and we tested several browsers and had the same issues.
When we export our log of approved and published posts, there is no way to export the destination link that was included with the post. It exports the percolate permalink but that requires the user to go back into Percolate, wait for the preview to load and THEN you can click and see the destination page. It would be much more efficient to include the destination URL in the reports functionality.
Likelihood to Recommend
Percolate is great for managing your company social media profiles, posting updates and using a variety of workflows for approval when necessary. The calendar feature is great if you need to view longer date ranges at one time. If you are only managing 1-2 profiles and don't need any type of approval process, you could probably use HootSuite or another free software platform. But if you have many profiles to manage and post from and need approval workflows, Percolate is great.
Percolate is a tool, and essentially the "hub", for our global social media marketing efforts. We currently utilize Percolate with our clients to resolve the following:
Global and local social content calendarizing
Access to image libraries that help subsidize costs and manage image rights
Global and local templating to create consistency across markets
Sharing social briefs across global markets
Providing management of releases with user generated content
Multiple user role management
Structured content approval across all stakeholders
Pros
Create social content from briefing all the way through to the approval process.
Social planner for managing topics and content streams across multiple channels.
Robust API and integrations.
Image library (with cost-free access/rights to stock photo libraries).
Frequent updates to the platform.
Built-in community management.
Cons
At times the platform can be buggy.
Analytics tool could be more robust.
Would be nice to have a stronger social listening component.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is absolutely phenomenal for global social management. If you are wanting to provide a center hub for oversight that can assist other markets with content, approvals and idea generation, then Percolate excels in that area. Overall, it is also a very cost efficient tool given other competitors in the category.
The platform is also well-built to suit an "all-in-one" workflow solution. With lean teams, Percolate can be the single go-to tool you need for planning, publishing and reporting. The built-in asset editor and approval process really takes the burden off juggling lots of different types of software and/or email.
Percolate is used across the marketing, communications and grassroots fundraising teams to schedule social media content, organize campaigns across teams and gain approval for social content. It is used primarily by the marketing team and members of the grassroots fundraising team who schedule social media content. We also use it to store photos and videos and discover content through the tool's Twitter discovery option.
Pros
Percolate has a great image editor that makes it easy to create images that are the correct size for social media.
Percolate's comment feature makes it easy to communicate with other team members about a post.
The Percolate team often updates the product to keep up with changes and new features from social networks.
Cons
Functionality can sometimes run slow, especially when new features are introduced.
Though Percolate tries to keep up, it is occasionally slow to add new features along with Facebook, for example creating carousel image posts.
Icons are not intuitive, so there is a learning curve to use all of its functionality.
Likelihood to Recommend
Percolate is very useful for social media scheduling across channels. It also offers an easy way to communicate with colleagues about social posts and gain feedback and approval. It also has a useful photography app that allows you to easily have someone fill out a photo consent form at events, which has been helpful for our communications team as well.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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).
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are a community manager or social media manager looking for a tool that focuses solely on content creation, Percolate is a perfect tool. Unlike most other tools, Percolate provides everything you need to build visually appealing content. This includes access to Getty Images, Shutterstock and your own built in media database with no limits on image storage.
The tool is less suitable as a listening/response tool (like Hootsuite), even though it does have support for this built in.
Percolate also provides excellent feedback on the results of your content, so you can see how well it did based off the metrics that really matter; like, reach, shares, virality.
The content creation tool even includes a built in image editor that offers brand friendly tools like logo drop-in, titles using your brand font and colors and other handy tools. These are often things that would need to be outsourced to a creative team, but can now be accomplished in under a minute.
The vendor includes a multi-stage onboarding procedure which starts with your account manager, followed by a brand onboarding tool and other online tools to learn about your brand voice and brand creative guidelines (like colors and logos). The end result is a tool that "knows" who you are.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (Telecommunications company, 201-500 employees)
