Many bloggers and marketers praise Medium as an excellent digital publishing platform option. They admire its easy-to-use editing tools, clean aesthetics, and potential to attract readers. Some say they obtain more readers on Medium than their own blogs that must rely on SEO and social media promotions.
Founded in 2012 by Ev Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, Medium can be described a cross between WordPress and Twitter. It’s a blogging platform with elements of social media. Readers can comment on posts, share posts with others, and follow writers. Medium does not require original content; writers and marketers can re-publish their blog posts on the platform. They can include links to their websites in an attempt to gain website traffic and gain SEO value.
Blogger Tiffany Sun said Medium sends more traffic to her blog, Rabbut, than Facebook and other social media sites. “You can throw out thousands of dollars into marketing or publish hundreds of blog posts, but this alone still won’t get you as much traffic as Medium gets,” Sun writes in ProBlogger.
Glean.info, formerly CyberAlert LLC, publishes articles on media monitoring and measurement as well as marketing and public relations on Medium.
A Balanced View of Pros and Cons
While most comments offer positive assessments of the blogging platform, Ashley Friedlein, chairman of Ably, offers a balanced review of the Medium’s pros and cons for marketers.
Medium should theoretically improve your SEO, but determining the precise SEO benefits is difficult. Williams once told CNN Money that the site draws more than 30 million unique visitors per month. However, despite anecdotal reports, hard data on Medium’s readership is difficult to find. Medium is better known among technology aficionados and early adopters. It’s not well-known among the general population, so might not be ideal for consumer brands.
“So it is hard to tell just how big an opportunity Medium is, or could become, for your particular audience,” Friedlein says. “At the moment it feels great for tech/B2B/lifestyle/entrepreneur types but perhaps less good for broader ‘consumer’ markets.”
“If your content is essentially marketing for something else, then publishing on Medium makes a lot of sense. If that content is the business/product (e.g. a media business) then you may be better publishing on your own site/domain for the maximum SEO benefits,” he writes.
Tips for Using Medium
Experts offer these tips for effectively using Medium.
Write long, but not too long. Most of the content being shared is longer than a typical social media post, but on the shorter side in Medium’s world, says Leo Ryan, vice president, customer solutions, at Spredfast, which analyzed Medium content. The most popular posts have an average of 5.8 minutes of reading time.
Seek to educate your audience about your brand but don’t request an immediate sale.
Mention your blog and link to it somewhere within your Medium post. “Personally, I like to add it at the bottom of my post under my bio snippet,” Sun advises.
Add tags to posts to help people discover your content through Medium’s search page.
Use Medium’s sharing tools to highlight snippets from your post for tweets.
Follow like-minded individuals in your industry to build your network of readers. The more content you publish, recommend and comment on the higher your visibility will become, writes digital marketing expert Susan Gilbert on Business 2 Community. “And because Medium is connected to your Twitter feed, you have the ability to find your followers there and follow them,” Gilbert adds.
Bottom Line: Medium has become popular among bloggers and marketers, especially those covering the technology and entrepreneurs. Proponents believe it can significantly grow a blog’s audience. Others caution that the publishing platform is not well-known among the general population. Predicting how much a brand can benefit from Medium is difficult, but it’s almost certainly worthwhile.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
