Storytelling—you love it and you hate it. Sure, it helps you cultivate existing supporters and find new ones. But publishing great content can be so incredibly time consuming and challenging, particularly when resources are limited.
Enter Medium. A booming storytelling/blogging social network, Medium solves for several common challenges around creating and publishing share-worthy content:
- Simple design enables easy content creation
- Social integration makes it easy to amplify your stories
- “Publications” empowers your organization to build an audience around content themes and reach untapped networks
There are a few things to keep in mind when considering Medium as another social channel to invest in…
How do I know what to post on Medium versus our own blog?
The short answer: it depends.
If your content strategy is driven by increasing your organic search traffic using highly targeted keywords and SEO, and you have limited resources for content creation, posting on your organization’s blog is a must. This is not to say you should never consider posting on Medium, but focusing on growing your website’s audience should be your first priority.
If your organization has a large following on social networks, as well as a large email list, sharing your stories and imagery on Medium is definitely worth trying. It can spice up your regular content strategy with its range of content formats and clean, simple design. For big, bold announcements around organizational milestones and launching new events or programs, you might even consider circumnavigating the press and posting on your own Medium channel (e.g. did you notice the White House released The State of the Union on Medium before it was delivered?!).
But don’t forget to tend to your website and blog channels with regular content updates. Consistency across all channels is key to content marketing success.
What types of stories should I post?
The options are endless, but some content types are more appropriate than others when posting on Medium:
- Long form content (anything over 1,000 words). For example, The Center of Investigative Reporting uses Medium to publish substantial stories. Medium shows the time that it would take to read the story, which helps set expectations when publishing long-form content.
- Image- and/or video-heavy content. For example, charity: water uses its beautiful field photography across all channels, including Medium. Their first post, “The Last Walk For Water,” is a great example of tying imagery into their stories.
How will anyone find my content on Medium?
“Build it and they will come” works to a point. But this is where your content distribution approaches come into play, whether it’s through email or your other social networks. Sharing your Medium stories will help make your existing audiences aware you’re on the platform, encouraging them to follow and recommend your stories. You can even embed your Medium stories on your organization’s website if keeping your audiences within your existing branded experience is important to your organization.
You can also promote your content within the Medium community. Publications are an extremely effective way to build your audience based on specific topics and keywords that relate to your content strategy and organization’s work. This feature enables invited contributors to publish stories in themed and focused channels. This is a similar to contributing to a like minded company or thought leader’s blog to reach their audience with your content.
How do I know it’s working?
Tracking the success of your Medium content is essential to understanding if this platform is worth the investment. Some key metrics to pay attention to:
- Referral traffic from medium.com to your website
- Number of Recommendations per post (similar to Facebook Likes)
- Number of followers on your Medium profile and Publications
- Social performance of tweets and Facebook posts directed to Medium stories
Depending on the volume of traffic you regularly get to your website, give yourself between three and six months to collect significant results and determine whether your content is driving traffic. This is all dependent on how often you post on Medium, as well as how relevant your content is to your intended audience, just as with any other social network. As long as your organization is dedicated to a content strategy, the key is to be consistent and contextual. Never forget your intended audience.
What’s the tl:dr?
With Medium, you should be able to generate more content, connect with your target audiences, and spend less time doing it. Before you know it, you’ll have dropped the “hate” from your love-hate relationship with storytelling.