Posted by randfish
Yes, you read that right. Today, I'm proud to say that the Followerwonk team is now part of SEOmoz and that a brand new version of Followerwonk has officially launched!
Followerwonk + SEOmoz PRO = Magic
If you've been in the SEO community for more than a few months, you've almost certainly heard of the remarkable tool for Twitter search, analysis and discovery called Followerwonk. We've loved and recommended their product for years and today, thanks to the merging of our companies, I'm excited to announce that Followerwonk is now included in SEOmoz PRO membership.
If you need no more details, head over to Followerwonk.com and connect your SEOmoz account through the link shown above. You'll instantly get access to the PRO version of Wonk's featureset.
Details on the Acquisition
After our funding from Foundry earlier this year, I reached out to Peter Bray, Followerwonk's founder and CEO, to talk about a potential acquisition. Peter and his team, Marc & Galen, are awesome guys - the kind we'd want to work with even if they didn't have this amazing product. After many late night emails, a few great in-person meetings and a bunch of legal paperwork, Followerwonk joined the Moz family in early June. For the last couple months, we've been hard at work making a clean integration and upgrading Wonk's infrastructure to support our nearly 20K SEOmoz PRO users.
Normally, I like to be wholly transparent about everything we do here at SEOmoz, and that would include acquisitions. However, in this case, I can't reveal all the details around the transaction. In being empathetic to the Followerwonk crew's personal finances, the best I can say is that the total deal value is in the low 7 figures (between 1mm and 4mm) and that it includes three items - cash upfront, ongoing cash incentives for the years the Wonk crew stay at Moz, and SEOmoz stock.
This also means SEOmoz now has a permanent presence in Portland, Oregon, at Peter's home, where he and Galen often work (and go to lots of coffee shops, too). In the future, we may establish a full office in Portland, mostly because we all love their restaurant and bar scene, and also because maybe their hipster clothing stores are way cooler than what I can find in Seattle.
Technically, this isn't our first acquisition. Back in 2008, we purchased Chas Williams' personal project, Blogscape, for the tidy sum of ~$20K (if memory serves). Chas came to SEOmoz as part of that deal and worked on Linkscape (now Mozscape) for several years before moving on. However, Followerwonk is certainly our first major acquisition and we've had such a good experience so far that we'll be likely looking to make more, similar investments in the future.
If you've got questions about the details of the deal, feel free to ask in the comments below. Peter and I will do our best to answer, though we'll be slightly limited from our normal preference of vastly over-sharing.
What Does Followerwonk PRO Include?
Wonk has 5 primary functionalities around Twitter analysis separated into their top 5 tabs, along with loads of useful details and features inside.
First is Twitter bio search. Technically, you can do this on Twitter itself, but you can't sort, filter, export or do all of the other cool advanced search stuff Wonk enables. Wonk also contains far, far fewer spam, non-active, and/or brand new accounts (~100mm accounts in Wonk vs. ~300mm in Twitter), so there's a lot more of the "quality" users a marketer might want to see and reach.
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e.g. I'm planning a trip to Belfast in September and hope to invite some SEOs like these to a bar meetup; ta da!
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Second is Followerwonk's "Compare Users" tab, which allows you to plug in any two or three Twitter accounts and see the overlap in followers or following. This is particularly useful as a marketer to answer the age old question, "will it really help if both of us tweet this?" I compared three SEO folks and was surprised at the degree of non-overlap!
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Crazy that only 2,217 people follow both @WilReynolds and @WillCritchlow. I'd have expected far more overlap.
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Third is Followerwonk's remarkable "Analyze Followers" Tab. Here you can get more details and stats than you can imagine about any Twitter user's followers (for very highly followed accounts, we use sampling). These features include:
- The geographic concentrations/locations of followers mapped visually on a globe
- Distribution of influence scores (so you can instantly see the most influential users who follow an account)
- Inferred gender distribution of followers (based on profile analysis)
- Distribution of follower counts, following counts, and account ages
- Distribution of tweet recency (to get a sense of how recently the followers have been on Twitter)
- Distribution of tweet quantity (to see total usage level)
- Language distribution
- Most active hours (as shown below, this one's hyper-useful for your own account)
- Word clouds of bios and locations
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e.g. Wil Reynolds has 5 followers with 500K-1mm followers; whoa!
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Clicking on that link, I can see that Gary Vaynerchuk is following Wil! Jealous!
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How cool is that? Fascinating to note that even at the peak time, only 6.6% of Wil's followers are on Twitter.
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Fourth is the "Track Followers" tab, where I can analyze my wins and losses over the last few months. Below, you'll see a nice graph of those who followed vs. unfollowed my account. In my experience, the spikes are tied to spam cleanup by Twitter and when I send contentious tweets (especially anything politically oriented).
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I want to have more days like June 27th! The cool part is that if you click a particular point on the graph, it brings up a list of folks who followed or unfollowed you that day.
Fifth, and finally, is the sort users tab, which lets you order followers by account age, number of tweets, followers, or following. You can also export this data to CSV/Excel (as with all Wonk tables) and build some very cool lists from there. For example, imagine choosing just your followers in a specific geography who have highly followed accounts and reaching out to them personally about an event you're holding/attending there. Good way to make Twitter friends into real friends!
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e.g. The oldest Twitter accounts following me, including the inimitable Dave McClure!
In terms of usage, Wonk's pretty straightforward:
The features of Followerwonk are, in my opinion, exceptionally complimentary to what we've got inside SEOmoz PRO, and I urge you to give them a spin. If you're not PRO, you can take a 30-day free trial and still use all the stuff inside Wonk.
How Followerwonk Can Help with SEO & Other Inbound Marketing Tasks?
I'm going to be writing more about this in the future, but in the meantime, I'd strongly suggest you check out these great posts and presentations on the topic:
- Link prospecting with Twitter tools and APIs (including Wonk!) from John Doherty of Distilled
- Use Followerwonk for Twitter audience development by Amanda Macarthur on the MeQuoda Blog
- Stalking for Links on Slideshare by Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive
- 6 tools to manage your Twitter followers by Duncan Parry on SearchEngineWatch
- Followerwonk - the social analytics tool for Twitter from the team at Web Talent Marketing
- Followerwonk, a powerful, free Twitter tool from Josh Davis at LLSocial
- Finding influencers using Followerwonk from Anna Francis at Blueclaw
Also, if you're a blogger and happen to write a post in the next day or two about using Wonk, please tweet at or email me and I'll be happy to include your stuff. I imagine there are dozens of tactical applications for Wonk that we've not even yet conceived of, but that could be highly useful.
Oh! And if you need more information or help, check out our Followerwonk video tutorial in the new help hub.
The Future of Followerwonk and SEOmoz
Needless to say, I'm extremely excited about this partnership. It's amazing to be able to wake up one morning and find my SEOmoz account suddenly gives me an entirely new product that I already love and use. Playing with Wonk, I don't think you'll have any trouble seeing why we fell in love, and if you meet the team, you'll get that same feeling.
As for the months ahead - Peter and his team will be working with us to spec out a roadmap for new features, upgrades, and data inside the product. That may even include expansion into networks like Google+ and/or Pinterest! We'll almost certainly be looking for feedback from you, and may launch a poll or survey to that effect in the very near future. For the next 6-9 months, expect to see Followerwonk exist as its own product, separate from SEOmoz (though connected to your PRO account). In the further future, we'll likely be doing more work to bake the products together and present a unified analytics experience.
p.s. You can read more about this news on PandoDaily, with whom we were excited to connect on the press announcement. I'd also like to offer my apologies to the team at Pando, who were originally scheduled to cover our funding announcement in May, but suffered a miscommunication on timing. I'm grateful to have a second chance to work together.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Ep9nz5ZBkd8/seomoz-pro-member-you-now-get-followerwonk-free
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