Twitter announced today it’s shutting down a feature called Dashboard, launched last summer, that allows businesses a suite of tools to track tweets, schedule posts, access analytics, monitor tweets about their brand or other keywords and more. The company says that Dashboard will be fully shuttered on February 3rd, 2017, but there’s not a solid transition plan in terms of how businesses will be able to access similar features going forward.
Instead, Twitter only says that it “hopes” to bring the best features from Dashboard to the broader Twitter community in the months ahead. That vagueness is not very promising, however.
The product may not have had a large install base, though, which is why it was marked for shutdown. According to App Annie, Twitter Dashboard was ranked a lowly No. 432 in the “Business” apps category on iTunes. And Sensor Tower says the app was downloaded around 40,000 times worldwide since its launch, and about 3,000 times in the past month.
Dashboard also saw some overlap with Twitter Engage, a tool for celebrities and other influencers, announced around the same time, which also included analytics.
While it makes sense that Twitter would have wanted to offer a product for its business customers, many of those who more directly handle their social media presence already use other, more feature-rich apps like Hootsuite, Buffer or Sprout Social, for example.
The move to close Dashboard, which was available both on the web and in a dedicated iOS application, follows other streamlining that’s been taking place at the company in recent months.
Twitter announced it was closing down Vine this past fall, and will only maintain a simple camera app in its place. It has also created less need for users to install its Periscope standalone app by integrating live streaming capabilities into Twitter itself.