They all publish content on Medium.
What is Medium?
Medium is a social publishing platform that is open to all and home to a diverse array of stories, ideas, and perspectives. Anyone can be an individual contributor, and popular topics on Medium range from mental health to social media, and from world affairs and trending news to productivity hacks.
As Medium founder (and Blogger creator/Twitter co-founder) Ev Williams wrote when he first launched the platform in 2012:
"Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say."
To help emphasize the importance of what it is you're saying, the overall design of Medium is minimalistic, featuring lots of white space and limited formatting options. Want to change the header typeface to Comic Sans? You can't. Medium won't allow for such atrocities of design.
But that's just one of many little nuances that come with the territory for Medium users. In fact, if you're just getting started on the platform, there's a fair amount to learn before you hit publish. Let's get into it ...
Writing for Medium
Anyone who has a Medium account can write for Medium — there's no other vetting process involved. To get started, simply sign up for a free Medium account (or upgrade to the full $5/month membership for unlimited access), and you're ready to start writing from there.
However, your post needs to adhere to Medium's content guidelines and rules. For instance, you can't promote controversial or extreme content on your Medium account. You can't facilitate buying or selling social media interactions, including off-platform. And you can't publish anything considered affiliate marketing content.
For the full list of rules in regards to content, take a look at this post on Medium Rules.
As a marketer, Medium presents an opportunity for you to reach a new audience with your content. The platform is geared toward sharing longer-form, more well-thought-out content. (But of course, given the open-to-all nature of Medium, that isn't the only type of content you find there.)
Whether you're looking into Medium for its publishing capabilities or you simply want to learn more about the platform before you set up an account and start exploring, you've come to the right place.
How to Use Medium
Getting Started With Medium
1. Creating an Account
While it's true that anyone can view Medium content (regardless of whether or not they have a Medium account), in order to publish and interact with folks on the platform, you need to have an account and be logged in.
Fortunately, you can create an account in less than a minute by going to Medium.com and clicking the "Get started" button in the center of the page (or the "Sign in / Sign up" link at the top of the page). From there you'll have three different sign-up options to choose from: Google, Facebook, and email.
My recommendation: Sign up for Medium using Google. That way all of your existing connections from Facebook who are on Medium will automatically be following your account once it's created. This saves you the trouble of having to build up a new audience entirely from scratch.
Regardless of the option you go with to start, you can always link your Twitter or Facebook to your Medium account later via the "Connections" tab in the Settings
Medium publications are collections of stories based around a common theme. Anyone can create them — yourself included — and the way they work is fairly straightforward.
As the creator of a publication, you're an editor by default, which means you have the ability to a) add writers to your publication, b) edit and publish the stories that are submitted by your writers, and c) review the metrics for all of the stories that are part of your publication. As the publication's creator, you'll also have the ability to appoint new editors (so they can do all of that stuff I just mentioned).
Now, on to tags.
Tags are sort of like the hashtags of the Medium ecosystem. When you publish a story on Medium, you get the option to add up to three tags, which appear at the bottom of your story. Clicking a tag brings you to a page where you can see more stories with the same tag, as well as some suggestions for other tags you might be interested in.
The main benefit of following tags is that it can help personalize your Medium experience. Instead of surfacing content based solely on your social graph (i.e., the people/publications you follow), Medium uses tags to surface content that's based on your specific interests as well. For example, if you're into baseball, you could follow the "baseball" tag. Into "small fluffy dog breeds"? Yep, there's a tag for that (granted only one story has been published under it).
So far in this introduction to Medium, we've acted mostly as passive observers. We've set up an account, and started following some accounts, publications, and tags. In the next section, we'll dive into the more interactive aspects of Medium.
How to Interact With Medium Content
3. Recommend, share and bookmark content.
The "Recommend" is the "Like" of the Medium world. It's a way to show you that you appreciate the content that someone has shared.
When reading a story on Medium, there are two places where you can recommend it: At the bottom of the actual story, where you see the clapping hand symbol.
Thank You.
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