Back in 2013 when Medium came onto the scene as a blogging platform I explored the features it had available but I decided not to create an account as I had many other platforms where I could publish.
Since them we have seen LinkedIn Publisher be available and Facebook Notes recently had an overhaul on Personal Profiles – see an example here.
I have noticed a number of tech organisations using Medium as their blogging platform and some of their employee advocates use Medium for their blog – as an example here is a developer from Google or a lead engineer from Uber. The platform is being used for many different types of content themes including political content to well known authors such as Margaret Atwood.
The platform is being used by people in roles in US government as you see in this example about improving the US immigration user experience by someone who works in The White House (The White House has their own Medium publishing channel) and the Washington Post ran an article asking if Medium could replace the op-ed page.
Medium has a good search facility – through it I discovered some UK and Irish businesses using the platform (though not consistently) were Amnesty UK, Water Aid UK, UNICEF Ireland, and Christian Aid.
Medium announced recently that they had raised $57 million in capital so I thought it was time to revisit the platform again.
When you register for an account on Medium you will be invited to determine the types of content that you might be interested in following.
There are a number of features that Medium have added over the years that make it an interesting content publishing platform. I have referenced link to help resources at the bottom of this article, but for example you can highlight specific content and leave a comment for the author as you can see in the screen shot below.
How To Publish Article On Medium As A Platform For Your Brand
If you want to explore using Medium as a platform for your own or your organisations brand, you can write new content or easily import articles you have written and then review and update the format of your content before publishing to Medium. (I have not managed to get this to work for Facebook Notes posts from my personal profile however.) As an example here is an article I wrote on this site and here is where it has been uploaded to my Medium blog.
You can media and links to your articles – in this example I added a header image which has the title and subtitle of the content appearing over the image for the article and it alos features a YouTube video I created.
Before you publish the article you have the ability to select the tags which help your content be discovered, change the privacy of the content and determine the license for your article.
Once you have published the article, you can then decide which content you wish to feature on your Medium profile.
The featured content will then appear at the top of your profile as with a pinned post on Facebook or Twitter.
Seven of the unique features of Medium include:
- the ability to share a draft of your article with others to get feedback before you publish
- revert to earlier editions of your post by reviewing your history of updates on an article
- make content unlisted so that only people you share the link with will be able to read it
- access to statistics on how many people have viewed, read and recommended your articles
- and if at any stage you want to export your articles you can access the export page in your settings
- you can create a hub of content if several of your team are posting content – see this example from Buffer
- curate content in what they call a publication – a good example is this one from Buffer – see an example of one I have just created here – and this can also have an associated ezine type feature that they call letters.
It appears that the Medium team want to be accessible and friendly as you will note from how they sign off their own posts – they have even used Twitter videos to respond to people using the #AskMedium hashtag. Though at the time of my writing this article they seem to be slow in responding on Twitter to my own Tweet to them for support.
Resources And Articles To Help You Publish On Medium
How to use images on Medium
How to insert title images in your articles
Tips for authors of Medium articles
How to add links to your Medium articles – and see an example in an article I wrote on Medium here
How to add tags to your story so that it will be discovered by other readers on Medium
How to feature a logo at the top of your story on Medium
How to add stories to publications on Medium
How to highlight content on Medium as a way of giving positive feedback to the author of the article
How to share quotes from articles you read as text images on Twitter
How to import your articles from your blog or website onto Medium
How to publish unlisted articles on Medium so that it does not appear on your Public profile
How to get your story read on Medium
How to easily write short posts on Medium
How to start your own Publication on Medium, how to manage your Publication, how to submit an article to a Publication, and how to create Letters for you publication
Details of how to access the iPhone and iPad app for publishing content to Medium
Details of how to access the Android app for publishing articles on Medium
Tips on how to use Medium as part of online communications.
Concerns You May Have About Publishing On Medium
I certainly think Medium is a platform to consider using if you have no blog for your business and are not sure if you will be able to maintain publishing to it – we see a number of organisations such as Blab and Periscope using Medium as a platform to write articles about updates to their services. I would always be cautious about investing in a free platform that you have no ownership of. I have personally had that experience publishing on a free platform called Posterous which was later sold to Twitter and then closed which meant that I had over 1000 articles that I needed to export (which I did) and re-optimse (this I did not do) to another platform.
If you are a solopreneur or want to have a platform to express your personal brand online for career success it is certainly worth considering against other blogging platforms, LinkedIn Publisher, Google Plus and Facebook Notes.
One concern you may have if you are using it for your business and cross posting content from your blog or website is whether Google will consider this as duplicate content – I never recommend just cross posting an article in full to another site for this reason.
Some interesting studies and articles on the issue you may face with cross posting from your own website to Medium can be accessed here and here and here and here.
And don’t forget to ensure that you include a call to action or calls to actions in your posts on Medium and of course you can add tracking codes to measure the traffic to your site from Medium.
Let me know if you think Medium has a place in your digital content tool kit. I certainly will be experimenting a little more now the platform has grown up a little. It is certainly worth a second look if like me you dismissed it a few years ago.
