Everything a community manager needs to create and manage content.
Rating: 9 out of 10
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
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.
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.
Vetted Review
1 year of experience