Medium: The Online Publishing Platform That Can Grow Your Audience

It’s now becoming popular for brands to be putting out content consistently that provides some type of value to their target market; whether this be content in video form, pictures, written, or audio form (i.e. podcasts). Regardless of the product or service a company sells, the company has a better chance to reach it’s target audience if they act like a media company.

If your company has a blog or is planning to start a blog, we recommend you think about Medium if you haven’t already. Medium is an online publishing platform that allows people to publish and read blog articles. Medium also allows interactions among different users. Medium’s mobile app has 1 million downloads on the Google Play Store alone. To get the gist of Medium is very simple; it is one of the best free blog sites out there.

Write

Medium’s user interface (ui) is straightforward and clean. There is no confusion on how to write a story. Medium calls it’s blog articles “stories.” Users can see all the stories you have published on your profile page. If you are tech savvy, learning to write on Medium will be a piece of cake. Heck, even if you are not, you’ll learn quickly. They make it so easy for you. The most popular topics that people write on and engage with seem to be around design, business (startups especially), self-improvement, and technology.

Medium allows you to add images, videos, and even gif’s to enhance your stories. The cool feature about writing on Medium is that it allows you to add a maximum of 5 tags to each story! You can add 5 tags that are related to your article, which gives you a chance to be discovered by people who are reading on topics that are related to your story. If you have your own blog on your website and a Medium “micro-blog,” you can be raising awareness for your brand on Medium. Some users on Medium may not come across your brand through your website or social media, but they have a better chance to come across it on Medium.

At Endertech, we post articles on our website and also post those articles on Medium. Why not use a free publishing platform as another distribution channel for blog articles? Medium also has “Publications.” Publications can be considered more of a micro-blog than a normal Medium profile. You get to be more organized with publications because you get to categorize your stories. You can also have different contributors write for your publication and those stories will appear in your publication’s profile.

Medium is extremely versatile as it lets you choose different layouts for your publication. Just like a normal Medium profile, publications are extremely simple to customize. You can view statistics for your stories for your Medium profile and/or for your publication. These statistics are under “Stats” which shows you “views”, “reads”, and “fans.”

Read

Search a topic you are interested in, and you will be shown the most popular stories related to the term you searched for. Medium is a great place to get insights and perspectives from people who are into the same field as you. It’s perfect for those who prefer learning by reading. Just like Medium does well with keeping it easy to publish stories, they also make it easy to read stories. The font is clean and big enough to read without a hassle. Every story has related stories at the end of it. You might find yourself in the never-ending funnel of Medium where you read one good story and you are recommended another story that you eventually read, then you see another story that sounds interesting….and you keep going. Consider this your adequate notice.

Interact

As you would assume, you get to comment on Medium stories. Comments are called “responses” on Medium. You will probably see people leaving long responses, which eventually turn a story into a longer version of itself with other people leaving their input. It’s a good way to jump in and interact with users that are interested in the same topics that relate to your company/industry.

It’s obvious that Medium tries to differentiate themselves from ordinary blogs. They change the names of the features that people are used to when reading a blog. You can also give a story a “clap.” I am sure you can guess what a clap is equivalent to. Yup, it’s a like.

Medium has a built in bookmark feature for users that want to save a story or want to read the story another time in the future. Finally, you have the sharing on social media options which consists of sharing to Twitter or Facebook. You will see popular stories get shared a lot. Just imagine all that FREE awareness these stories are receiving. If you haven’t tried Medium out, give it a shot. Make it part of your marketing strategy!