You Ask, I Answer: 8 Tips for Using Medium as a Brand

In today's episode, Audrey asks, Since you mentioned Medium, if you have anything else on how to use that platform as a brand. I would love that. So Medium, uh, Medium.com is a it's a long form content platform. It's a blogging platform essentially that allows authors uh to monetize their content by distributing membership fees. Members pay five dollars a month, and then depending on who likes your stuff and how often they like it, uh you may get a couple of pennies per member.

So the main use as a brand is as a marketing platform for your long form content. So let's dig into how you might use this platform. One, do not think of Medium as an SEO play for search engine optimization. It really isn't an SEO play. You can put links in your articles and stuff like that, and that's fine.

But because everything is on the same domain, medium.com, uh, you're gonna get very little traction in terms of unique domains. They have to you've linked up from your own articles. So there's very little benefit there. Think of it instead in terms of a social network. Medium is a social network for long form content in the same way that YouTube is a social network for video content, right?

Uh so or uh Twitch is a social network for live stream content. So Medium is a social network for long form content. Approach it from that approach. In fact, in the early days, you could actually connect your Twitter account and import your followers, which uh I know a lot of folks did early on and and gained very rapid followings on Medium, but you can no longer do that, um uh, which is too bad. Your content strategy on Medium has to be dictated by who your followers are and what they want.

On your profile, if you click on your business profile or any profile on Medium, you can see who follows that and read their bios. The thing to do there is to extract all those bios and uh then analyze them for what is it that your readers have a background in that they could potentially want more information about and then run your content analysis to write for that audience to create content for that audience. In terms of what audiences want on Medium, uh they tend to re reward length more than anything else. About a year ago at Trust Insights, we did a study of what got uh the most claps, which is medium's version of likes, and uh more than anything, it was post length, was it was what uh had the highest uh relationship mathematically to likes. We should probably refresh that study now that think about it.

It's been about a year, and uh there's certainly a ton of content that we could uh do some more thorough analysis on. If you're going to repurpose content you've published elsewhere, you want to use the rel canonical attribute in your medium post to say, hey, this is not the original piece, the original piece is over here, and then link to that original piece, uh always pointing back to your original site. Otherwise, uh Google is likely to treat now. This is this is an SEO thing. Uh, Google is likely to treat Medium as the more authoritative site for that content rather than your own domain.

So make sure that you don't injure your own SEO efforts by publishing a copy of a piece of content that lives elsewhere without using that canonical event uh tag. If you do not intend to monetize your content, uh you only get mediums built in analytics, and they're not very good. You basically get a at a post level uh the number of uh views, the number of claps, uh, and that's really about it. And you get it broken down by month, so it's not very granular. And there's no option to include things like your own Google Analytics tag.

So uh you're not going to be getting very good analysis from that, which means that you need to be vigorous and vigilant about uh making sure you do things like UTM tagging, any links that you put in your medium content so that you're sending traffic back to your website and you can track that traffic and see what happens to it. And again, claps, that's the main metric on medium, not very useful unless you're monetizing your content. So use those UTM tracking codes. One thing that I think is really important for getting the most out of medium is making sure that you are putting in at least one, if not two calls to action in your content. One at the very beginning, somewhere in that first paragraph or two, and then one at the end, maybe uh um a piece of HTML code that says like you if you like this article, you might also like these other posts that I've done, and you can link uh back to your company's blog and stuff on those as well, uh, or to other medium posts if you want to drive readership to medium posts.

Is medium valuable for your brand? Again, it depends on how much long form content you've got. Go through your own company blog and count up the number of blog posts you have on your company blog that are a thousand words or more. If the number of the total number of those is zero, then medium is not a good platform for you because it does not do well with short form content. If on the other hand you have, you know, fifty percent, sixty percent, seventy percent of your content is a thousand words or more, uh, then you have a candidate for publishing content on medium because that structurally is likely to do well.

The other thing is that because it's long form content, your content has to be written well. You are competing against other people who are writing, sometimes professionally writing on medium, meaning that they're going to be uh using it to drive income for themselves, and your content's got to be good. It is trite to the point of uh exhausting to say, but if your content isn't better than what everyone else is publishing out there, it's not going to get any traction and your effort or wait if your efforts are wasted. With Medium, especially, uh, because again, it's not much of an SEO play. If you have the uh a pool of say hours to work on Medium every month, right?

Say you have five hours a month, you are much better off spending all five hours on one piece of content for medium than trying to do 10 pieces uh 30 minutes each and ending up with hash for them because it's not going to it's just not going to do as well. So you you will definitely need that time to create high quality content. Now, where this could be a game changer for brands is as our artificial intelligence technologies get better and better at writing, eventually we will be able to use uh and train our our tools to uh on the best performing medium posts in order to use AI to generate new ones. That will uh that would be a game changer for any brand that has the capacity and the budget to do so because it is an extensive training process to do that. But if you can do that, if you have that capability, then medium suddenly starts looking very appealing because if you can put up high quality, really good content, you know, a thousand or two thousand pieces of content a day, then you're gonna win at Medium and it's gonna be a massive business driver for you.

But you're going to have to decode that technology to make it work. So that's where you could go with Medium as a brand once you have that technology in-house. But again, remember it's a social network for long-form content. Do not think of it as an SEO play. If you want to just generate content for attracting traffic, you are much better off putting that on your company blog first and then syndicating it to Medium.

So great questions, Audrey Audrey. There's a lot to be done in Medium. Uh, there's a lot you can experiment with. It does require investment. It does require experience and expertise, domain expertise in whatever it is that your company does in order to produce high quality content.

Um, and for those who are experimenting in the machine learning and AI space, medium is a rich opportunity if you've got the right tools. As always, please subscribe, uh please leave your comments below and then subscribe to the YouTube channel and and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems, visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.