What Pinterest is calling a new “look” is less of a redesign, and more of a new version. There’s lotsa new stuff (“related” Pins, a la YouTube, huge discovery flow), and a lot of removed stuff (bye-bye “origin” trail, a la Tumblr, pout).

Many of these changes are of interest to marketers, but this post is gonna focus on the biggest one: The Twitter social graph (aka, “friend finder”) is now completely accessible in Pinterest.

In other words: you can find your Twitter community, and they can find you, in a much more straight-forward way.

Twitter social-graph access is a critical tool for marketers and businesses on social platforms, because Facebook friend-finding is pretty much useless for businesses: Pinterest lets you connect to your personal Facebook account, but your business’s hundreds/thousands of Facebook Page Likers are lost in a black hole, inaccessible to your business’s new presence.

Twitter’s all-accounts-are-the-same (no distinction between “real person” and “business page”) structure works much better for joining new networks, and bringing over a community.

But until now, Pinterest had been kinda half-assed about Twitter social-graph access.

In the old Pinterest, at time of sign-up, you got a decent one-time pass at finding your Twitter buddies. But after that, you only got occasional email about Twitter friends joining, and a wacky, peekaboo feed that came and went with some of your Twitter friends (not clearly marked as Twitter friends, btw).

When you clicked “see all” you were brought to a Find Friends page that DID NOT INCLUDE TWITTER, just Facebook, even though it was just showing you a preview of Twitter friends. This has driven me crazy for a year+.

Now let’s look at the new Pinterest Friend Finder.

This is more like it! Here are your Twitter friends!

Yay. Nothing like not having to rebuild your community from scratch.

Big + welcome news.

PS- It’s worth noting that this does not require you to declare your Pinterest account a “business” account, or to have verified your website. The Twitter social graph access applies to all accounts who have upgraded to the new Pinterest.

PPS- the new Pinterest is not without some bugs/unfortunate changes. While I’m very enthusiastic about the new Twitter social graph access, I still recommend a fully considered evaluation before upgrading your Pinterest account.

[12:02 PM. Update with workaround.]

Here’s a workaround I got on Twitter from @raydennis + @GINGERtweetz:

Stay logged in to your personal account, visit the Activity Log url for your page: https://www.facebook.com/YOURBUSINESSPAGENAME/allactivity.

The Activity Log will be visible.

—-

When the going gets weird, the weirded go to Twitter to make sure they’re not the only ones.

You’re not.

The Facebook Activity Log for Pages is busted right now. Basically you get a blank page. (Personal account Activity Log is working just fine.)

Here’s user-started thread in a Facebook support forum.

One user suggested that this bug was only happening in some browsers, but I can’t reproduce functionality in any browser at the moment.

On a slightly hopeful note: if you View Source on your Activity Log page, you can see lotsa HTML all about your activities… commented out (!?). So your stuff is fine, just mostly invisible at the moment.

Based on chatter, it looks like this has been going on for at least 5 hours as of 11:30 Pacific, no response from Facebook yet.

“To anyone unfamiliar: This write-up explores a subset of Tumblr and deeply mischaracterizes the broader network.

There are certainly reclusive communities living on Tumblr, but it’s also home to millions of very extroverted (and very talented) creators who have built an audience of 170 million people.

There’s certainly a busy (and hilarious) corner full of memes and GIFs, though you’ll find topics like fashion, music, or illustration with bigger footprints.

It’s easy to generalize Tumblr. With 43 billion posts, whatever you find you’ll find a lot of it. But the diversity (of people, genres, and media) is something we cherish and do everything we can to support. It’s easy to miss if you spend all your time hanging out in one corner. So, yes – it’s not what you think!

Also, it’s “tumblelog”, though we just call’em blogs these days. :]”

/via comment from Tumblr creator David Karp, left under a mischaracterzation of Tumblr

Again:

“It’s easy to generalize Tumblr. With 43 billion posts, whatever you find you’ll find a lot of it.”

Related: the psychological misstep, confirmation bias.

You may regularly hear the following about Tumblr:

• “Tumblr is for hipsters.”
• “Tumblr is just porn.”
• “Tumblr is good if you’re into Japanese animation.”
• “Tumblr is full of middle-schoolers.”

When explaining Tumblr to anybody even remotely familiar with Twitter, I often compare the two (Tumblr often bristles at comparisons to Twitter, but they have so, so much in-common, both in terms of structure/interactions, and user activity). There are many styles and genres on both platforms. Down-to-business feeds, conceptual art (weird twitter: seapunk tumblr, you feel me?), glossy promos, emo tweens, endless/rigorous political threads… ) But mostly: they are a format, not a style or flavor of content.

Because Tumblr has few/highly curated discovery tools, it can be hard to see what exactly is goin’ on in there, and that’s one reason why it’s constantly underestimated/mischaracterized. But there is a lot going on, both in depth and breadth.

Mischaracterized or not, this debate usually happens between somebody sold on it, and somebody saying it’s a waste of time.

While I’m completely sold on Tumblr, I’m fine with folks not using Tumblr. We should all be so happy.

But when I hear that this same Tumblr-less person is spinning their wheels on Google+ or Facebook ecommerce, then I go into full-on Tumblr evangelical mode.

Get on Tumblr, and get your life.

Sidebar:

• Tumblr For Brands LinkedIn Group 

Related stuff you may wanna check out:

• The four minute (musical!) primer on Tumblr you gotta share with newbies
• Debunking Tumblr Myths: Tumblr isn’t good for business-to-business
• Facebook marketing’s law of diminishing returns

Yesterday Facebook launched a developer (video) channel featuring screencasts, tutorials, and talks about its ever-changing developer experience. Especially useful for agencies creating and measuring social projects.

It’s a little confusingly-named, “Facebook Developers Live,” which suggests an event, but it’s actually more of a hub. That said, there also appears to be future webinar/Google Hangout-like “live” events that you can attend. (which will be recorded and available there)

“A stuffed rabbit sewn from velveteen is given as a Christmas present to a small boy, but is neglected for toys of higher quality or function, which shun him in response. The rabbit is informed of magically becoming Real by the wisest and oldest toy in the nursery as a result of extreme adoration and love from children, and he is awed by this concept; however, his chances of achieving this wish are slight.

One night, after the boy has misplaced his cherished china dog, he is pacified through the presence of the rabbit, who attracts more attention from his owner from then onward as a result, to the extent of his promotion to the position of the child’s favorite toy. However, when the toy rabbit’s owner contracts scarlet fever, he is prescribed a trip to the seashore and is pacified upon receiving a stuffed rabbit of higher quality as a replacement for the Velveteen Rabbit, which must be burned alongside all of the other playthings due to potential bacteria.”

im just saying

(plot summary via wikipedia)

Yep, it’s true. Reach (determined by Edgerank) for your Profile Page on Facebook is bad, and recently got a bit worse. Report after report, from both individual brands, and agencies, confirm this.

So don’t invest a ton of strategy in your Facebook Profile Page. Y’all know I’m down on Facebook in general.

But something that bothers me about the recent Reach-bashing is that it might accidentally give folks a premature, “Screw Facebook” attitude. Facebook is more than Profile Pages.

Yes, Facebook Profile Pages are an unreliable funnel, but Facebook drives tons of traffic.

So where is this traffic coming from if it’s not coming from Profile Pages?

It’s coming from off-site. Err… on other sites. Like your site. People FB Like/Recommend/Share from the web/apps off of Facebook that have Facebook Share/Like/Recommend buttons, it shows up in their feed, then people click out from there. (Reminder: When a person shares something in a feed, it has better Edgerank than when a Profile Page shares something.)

A Facebook Profile Page is not the only path to Facebook users. Facebook is mostly tons of people who will never Like your Profile Page. But they may very well Share your off-site stuff in their feed. Sure that doesn’t feel like a “capture.” But a Profile Page Like is just the illusion of a capture.

So make it easy for folks to do Facebook actions from your site/store/social-object-of-choice. Put Facebook actions in handy locations around your site. Do a little testing, and let your audience amplify your stuff on Facebook better than a Profile Page ever could.

As for what I’ve reblogged below? It’s a well-told account from an artist about how weak Facebook Profile Page Reach is, and how nothing beats email. Sound familiar?

gordonwithers:

 

I’m calling it - Facebook is pretty much useless for musicians at this point.

Much has been made about Facebook’s recent changes to their proprietary algorithm EdgeRank, especially with regard to forcing brand/organization Pages to pay to get more prominent placement in their fans’ news feeds. Rumors fly freely; small businesses are easily taken in by misinformation, and re-post the dubious “you must add us to your ‘interests’ list” message, brands mistakenly believe that their posts before the changes were always reaching their fans, and most regular users probably have no idea what is going on at all.

The simplest explanation is probably the closest to the truth - Facebook is trying to squeeze more advertising money out of the brands that use it, in order to please investors. This article, “Is Facebook Broken On Purpose To Sell Promoted Posts?” sums it up well. So what? Facebook is, of course, free to do what it wants with its own platform. They have always seen their competitive advantage as “Facebook knows what you want better than you do.” The news feed is the best example of this - EdgeRank heavily filters and sorts your feed, pushing more “compelling”/popular content to the top, showing more posts from those you interact with frequently, and showing more of certain types of content (photos), and less of others (text-only status updates). So many interactions trigger events on Facebook that viewing them all (“Most Recent” or the “Yo Dawg We Put A Facebook In Your Facebook” right-hand pane) is like being blasted with a MySQL-based fire hose.

The problem here is two-fold:

- Promoted posts aren’t really advertising, they’re pay-to-play.

- The experience for everyone, Page owners and fans alike, is completely unpredictable.

Basically Facebook is undermining its own EdgeRank system by giving Page owners the opportunity to pay to temporarily override it. No Page was ever reaching all of its fans with any one post, to be sure, but it is much worse (by some accounts, 50% worse) since the recent changes. Look at this ridiculous screenshot above. With 438 fans, and 14 hours live, this post was only seen by 22 people. It’s a middling-ranked content (links are below photos but above text-only posts), and no one has liked or commented on it yet - but how is it supposed to receive rank-boosting likes and comments if no one ever sees it in the first place? As for the fan side - users are deliberately liking Pages and, in most cases, expecting to see updates from those Pages appear in their news feed. In many cases, folks are doing this instead of signing up for an email list, which is a huge problem. But again, Facebook knows best, and content from most Pages a user likes will never be shown. Page owners who had previously found Facebook useful for interacting with fans are now having a much harder time, and some cases their sales are suffering. Unlike channels like email, Twitter, or Tumblr, where your message always shows to 100% of your followers (assuming they’re reading), Facebook’s system is unpredictable unless you’re willing to spend vast sums of money promoting everything.

[here’s the point where I can’t believe I’m wasting my lunch break writing about Facebook, so let’s wrap this up]

What musicians (and other small Page owners) should do:

- Email is your friend. If people want to hear from you, they should be on your email list. If you don’t have one, go sign up at mailchimp or tinyletter immediately. Then try to get as many folks as possible to sign up.

- Don’t ever rely on Facebook to be your primary web presence. Set up your own site, blog, or point your domain to Tumblr. I use Tumblr because it is free, fairly straightforward to set up, and predictable (so far). They’re starting to experiment more with advertising too, but in very tasteful and innovative ways (shoutout to Rick Webb) without breaking the user experience for anyone. Use Facebook as a necessary outpost to drive people to your main site and/or email list.

- get excited about the potential for New Myspace (I’m only being half-facetious, this actually looks potentially great)

- Educate your friends & fans about Facebook’s unreliability. It’s a fine site for photo-sharing and keeping up with family and close friends, but it can’t replace more stable, predictable mediums like email, and well, The Internet in general.