Medium turned the blogging sphere on its head. The brainchild of the co-founder of Twitter has brought digital publishing to the next level for readers and writers alike. Actually, in its realm, readers are writers and vice versa. The content creation platform is open to anybody with something worthy of sharing. It’s interesting to take a peek behind the curtains of Medium’s success. Pro content writers can all learn something from the way Medium builds engagement and interest.
In Search of Meaningful Content
A counterweight to the short attention span culture
Our digital landscape is often overwhelmed by ephemeral content. Yet, Medium is a platform that offers the exact opposite – long articles, often written on issues societies and businesses face, along with trending topics on culture, technology, and so much more.
In a culture of instant everything, we start to crave depth and meaning.
You can find all kinds of people on there too, not just content creators, per se, but entrepreneurs, business owners, and just anyone who enjoys engaging writing, clean design, and straightforward usability.
This is where Medium’s advantage comes along. Although businesses have been trying to adapt to creating and sharing short-form content, Medium proves that people are willing to spend time on something that strikes their interest.
Email Marketing & Mastering Recommendations
The art of curating content for engagement
When it comes to content creation, it’s not enough to just create an appealing piece if it won’t reach the person who will read, share and even feel excited for discovering it, a.k.a. the ideal reader. Any other targeting is just a shot in the dark. So, curating content becomes just as important as creating it.
True to its name, the platform is a medium for producing original content and sharing it with the right people.
The key is in the title
The first thing you see as a subscriber when you open your email from the Medium team is a title of an article carefully picked for your unique tastes and preferences. But the true success of engagement comes from making this user click to open that email in the first place. How do you do that? You make sure the title immediately sparks the interest of your target audience.
That’s why most of the time the articles that catch your attention are the ones with a title that is just hard to pass on. Now that’s a technique that content writers use all the time but the trick is to avoid making it sound like a clickbait but instead, make a bold statement that deserves further exploring.
Making Both Businesses & Creatives Happy
The principles of social inclusion and co-creation
Medium gives the chance to businesses to offer value. It demonstrates that blog writing is just as good of a tool for influencing people as any other. I know, a tale as old as time, but as we said, many businesses have been influenced by recent trends to shift towards short-lived content and long formats were more of a second choice.
Social engagement is becoming harder for platforms of any kind.
What Medium has done is offer a platform for everyone (here comes the social inclusion, both amateurs and accomplished writers can publish an article) that doesn’t get flooded by low-quality content. Wikipedia, another example of the same thing, works on the same principle. However, it has long lost our 100% trust and we rarely use it as a primary source of information.
It’s about knowing your customers
With blogging, it’s about observing trends, presenting solutions, life-hacks, or just offering a point of view. It’s flexible and it can serve your business in the way that you want it to. Whether you write the content yourself or with the help of pro website writers, it’s still a matter of judgment.
There is so much more that makes Medium unique – design, usability, and functionalities (like the little clapping hands) are all things I didn’t touch upon in this article, but they too play a major role. However, in terms of content creation and distribution, their model proves that successful audience growth is completely possible through meaningful content, social engagement, and masterful content personalization.
