Lithium

Author: Jenna Vasquez

Lithium, once known as ScoutLabs, was founded in 2001 and is currently headquartered in San Francisco, California with their global office in Austin, Texas. They also have offices in London, Paris, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Zurich. They have over 300 employees and several investors.

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The Good

• Active community forum
• Reports
• Time in business
• Features

Lithium is one of the very few social media management companies that has an active community forum. They have helpful threads that can answer customers' technological and basic questions. They even have suggestion thread where users can give Lithium ways that they can improve their services. Lithium provides users with analytic reports for both the social web and community. They show real time insight into social teams, benchmark performance against KPIs, and more. With these reports you can measure your agents and workgroup performance. Their community analytics will reveal ways to measure and improve community health. Of all the companies investigated, Lithium has been around the longest. They were founded in 2001, so they've been in business for nearly 15 years. This clearly reveals that they have the most experience, compared to the other companies researched, in the media industry. They have several additional features that consumers will enjoy. Lithium provides 24/7 instant response from customer support. Users have the ability to connect directly to customers through different social channels and take action from customer's feedback and ideas. They provide metrics monitoring, CRM integration, translation for more than 25 different languages, and video publishing capabilities. All posts are scanned and prioritized based on keywords.

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The Bad

• Transparency
• Platform limitations
• Lack of app ratings
• Dashboard

They do not disclose their prices for each of their plans. To get pricing, you have to send in a request for a personalized quote. You can only get a free trial for their Foundation plan, also by request only. Some requests for a free trial are actually denied, due to certain volume, activity and response thresholds. Moreover, consumers actually have to qualify for a free trial (they do not disclose how long the free trial will be for) and the free trial is only for their most basic plan. Unlike most of their competitors, they do not offer the option to connect to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Plus, YouTube, Foursquare, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram and a few others. The only social media platforms they support are Facebook, Twitter and certain industry forums. Although it is great that they provide an iOS and Android app, both currently do not have any reviews or ratings. Lithium's dashboard and interface is said to be simple, but not innovate or current. They do not have as many capabilities and upgrades as some of the other social media management tools in the industry.

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The Bottom Line

Lithium provides businesses with a dashboard to view their community and customer's social media alerts and messages. This way, they can respond in real time to any of their customer's concerns or questions. They have a very impressive clientele that leads us to believe that their services are expensive. Unfortunately, they do not disclose their pricing and a few other important aspects we needed to compare to other companies. We suggest requesting a demo or a free trial from them. If you can afford their product, Lithium may be worth looking into.