Digital marketing giant Moz has announced that they'll be re-focusing their efforts on SEO and search marketing and de-emphasizing some of their broader offerings, including Moz Content and - most importantly for social media marketing folk - Followerwonk.
In a statement, Moz CEO Sarah Bird says that they've not seen significant enough revenue impact from their expanded product suite to justify the ongoing investment.
"After a lot of analysis and soul searching, we decided to radically simplify our strategy to re-focus on what we love and what our customers value from us: search. Reducing product complexity also creates space for us invest in the technical and business infrastructure we need to support growth. We're also increasing investment product marketing, CRO, SEO, and email marketing."
In even sadder news, Moz is also reducing their staff by 28%. Moz is a hugely valuable and trusted resource, and that's only been made possible by the work of their team. We feel for the entire Moz group as they go through this tough transition.
Moz Content provides content audit and research tools - Bird says this tool will be shut down shortly. Followerwonk, meanwhile, is a beloved tool for many social media marketers.
With Followerwonk, you can enter the Twitter handle of any user and get a range of in-depth data, including the most common bio keywords of their followers, most active hours of their audience, mapped location data and a a heap of other useful stats.
Such insights are great for assessing and analyzing social profiles and getting a better handle on audience details - you can even hone in on the specific locations of your audience.
Bird says that they'll be "looking for a good home" for the tool, so it's not 100% clear what the app's fate will be, but potentially, it'll soon be gone and you'll need to seek out alternate apps for the same purpose.
Similar to the closure of another tweet analytics tool Topsy last year, the removal of Followerwonk would make it just that little bit harder to get analytical insight on tweet data. Most, if not all, of Followerwonk's functionality is available in other apps and tools, but Followerwonk integrates a wide range of functions and its presentation and advanced options are top notch. Of course, Twitter itself is working to integrate more analytics and data tools into its own, on-platform options, with the release of 'Dashboard' for businesses back in June and 'Engage' for creators at the same time. But tools like Followerwonk offer more options for additional analysis depth, particularly on competitors, and Twitter doesn't yet provide direct alternatives for all such options.
Hopefully there'll be a way for Followerwonk for survive, but again, the bigger element at play at this stage is obviously the human impact of the changes at Moz. Hopefully the team are able to action their transition in the most effective and mutually beneficial way possible for all involved.