Medium—It’s Getting Big

As an agency that puts a high priority on content creation as a part of our proactive PR strategy, we at InkHouse have long recognized the value of blogging platform Medium. InkHouse’s Beth Monaghan and Lee Glandorf have both taken detailed looks into the site, outlining its benefits and explaining the value to companies and individuals looking to syndicate their posts, increase viewership and expand their thought leadership presence.

In case you were still unconvinced, consider the following growth stats from The San Francisco Business Journal:

• Medium attracted 16 million global visitors in September, up from nine million in June.
• Despite the fact it’s only two years old, Medium is already making its first revenue from a deal it secured with BMW back in August.
• Today Medium boasts a staff of 73 employees, most of which are on the technical side. They’re aiming to improve the site’s navigation and user experience.

What makes Medium such a favorable, ahem, medium for the writer looking to spread his or her content as widely as possible? Below are three features that especially make the platform stand out:

1.       Social media compatibility. Medium was created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, and the presence of his original brainchild is quite evident. Users sign in through either their Twitter or Facebook account, and they can also monitor the Twitter conversation about their story. Medium follows tweets to notify you what people say about the story on Twitter, making it easy to remain involved in the conversation on social media well after it was originally posted.

2.       Valuable readership statistics. Oftentimes monitoring a story’s impact requires intuition and some guesswork, but stories posted on Medium are easy to measure. Users simply need to refer to their stats page for information on number of views, reads and referrals. You can also click on “Referrers” to find out which websites link to your story.

3.       Import/Export features. Ok, so you think Medium may be an option but don’t know how to transition because all of your content lives elsewhere. Medium allows you to link to your original post where it already lives, and the story is simply uploaded to for you to preview then post on your Medium profile. Easy as that. And once you’ve accumulated enough stories, you can export all your Medium posts in a single Zip to have them on file all in one place. You can download an archive of your Medium content at any point.

In today’s day and age you can no longer expect your blog to get the proper exposure without syndicating and promoting on social. Medium offers a streamlined channel to both increase viewership and easily incorporate with your social profiles, while providing transparent metrics to determine what content reads best. So take a few minutes to go write something new or bring back something old. No matter what, it should start—and end—with Medium.