Are you publishing great content on your own public domain and not receiving the views you’d like? If so you should consider using Medium, a social media platform designed for large scale writing.
What is Medium?
Medium is a very simple site to use and can really boost your large scale content to new heights in a very short period of time, which is a marketer’s dream.
The site allows it’s users to publish content to a social network of full length feature articles on a range of topics, from sport to travel to business and back again.
Medium’s design layout is extremely simple and lacks any real customisation points for the author, and it does this entirely on purpose. Posting written content to a predominantly white screen with very basic text functionality seems really silly, however Medium creates an interesting platform for a reader where he/she can have a written piece containing no fancy distractions, that readers can find themselves completely immersed in the writing.
How does it assist with my viewership?
This site works in a very similar way to most social networks. The user signs up and creates his or her profile, based on their own personal likes and dislikes. These profiles provide the base and show the readers who is writing each individual blog.
A cool nuance of Medium is that whenever you create a profile, should you use your Twitter or Facebook account to sign up, you automatically start following other Facebook friends or Twitter followers and they start following you.
In today’s day and age where social media is such a like centric industry, you’ve essentially received free likes on your Medium profile, solely because of these automatic followers.
One of the most important and interesting features of Medium is the fact that all users receive email digests featuring content from any publisher or publication that they have followed, directly into their own email inbox. This is potentially an awesome tool for small business owners as it gets their written content not only on the internet, but right into their target audience’s inbox each time something is posted.
In addition to this, if your content is recommended by another Medium user with a larger following, then your work will appear and be accessible to that user’s followers.
It is all entirely based on the profile’s setting whether or not they receive the email digest, however the digest is sent by default so unless the settings are actively changed, then you have the potential to get your content to a multitude of inboxes and subsequently people’s eyes around the world.
Can people interact with my story within Medium?
The short answer to this question is simply, of course they can interact with the story.
Medium allows readers to interact with almost every part of an author’s story through the action of highlights. Readers can simply highlight a part of the text that they enjoy and be exposed to multiple features which they can interact with.
Your Medium profile is made up of the stories that you create and the posts in which you have interacted with and highlighted.
The pencil icon in the above screenshot will add the highlighted quote to your personal profile’s highlights. The speech bubble icon allows the reader to interact with the article and comment on it at that exact point of the post. The Twitter icon as you can probably imagine allows the reader to share the quote on Twitter, along with the link to the entire Medium article. Finally, the small padlock icon allows the reader to send a private message that is only visible to the author of the piece.
On top of these unique online interactions, typical stuff such as liking the article, commenting on the entire article, bookmarking and sharing on various other social networks are all entirely possible and can be clearly visible at the base of the post.
This just sound like a blog, how can I use it to my business’ advantage?
Medium can be used in a way that is extremely beneficial to businesses and one of those ways in through the use of publications. Publications are a way in which you can group your posts together and allow readers to subscribe just to the publication you’ve created. This allows you to send letters, which are stories within a set publication, directly to your followers.
Another incentive of creating a publication is you can invite co-workers or other people from different fields of knowledge to collaborate with you and post stories into your publication. This in itself is such a basic form of networking, however can greatly improve your business relationships and lead to other collaborative efforts that can propel your business and improve it’s public image.
The business world and the social media world are both ever-changing and it’s because of this that Medium is such a nice tool for you to utilise and separate yourself from the competition. It does lack the eye catching glamour of a WordPress article, but what it lacks in glamour it makes up for in user interaction. People view articles on Medium for the content, the words, the message, not for an amazing background or really cool font. Keeping it simple has been a strategy that has been used right across every industry, Medium is keeping content creation simple.
