Medium helps companies big and small to share their stories and ideas. This guide takes you through the process of getting started.
Signing Up
Clicking “New Story” on the Medium homepage will prompt you to sign in to your Twitter or Facebook account. Your profile will be automatically created. All published stories appear on your profile (http://medium.com/@username) and will be distributed to your profile’s followers.
Sign up using one of your organization’s existing accounts so that your current followers can find you more easily on Medium.
We recommend signing in with Twitter, since Facebook doesn’t allow signing in with Pages. Of course, you can still sign in with an individual Facebook user account.
Getting Oriented
Click on the “M” logo in the upper-left corner to navigate Medium and view your latest activity notifications.
You can use the links under this menu to:
- Create a “New story” and start writing.
- Review unpublished “Drafts” and share them with collaborators.
- View your “Stats” page to measure the impact of your story.
- Create and manage “Publications” to organize and distribute your stories by theme.
- View your profile and published stories by clicking your name.
- Edit your account settings by clicking the gear icon.
Writing & Editing
Medium’s editing tool allows you to easily write and format beautiful stories. Access this page by clicking “New story” or through the Drafts page.
As you draft your post, it will appear as if in its published form.
Images can be inserted and formatted as you type or after you’ve finished composing your text.
As you write, you can either type new text directly in the editor, copy and paste already-written text from a word processor, or copy and paste your existing published content. Thus, you can use your Medium account as a source of original story content and company announcements, like Secret. Or, you can cross-post content from your corporate blog to reach a wider audience, as Tesla Motors did for Elon Musk’s announcement of changes to the Model S. You can even share content that you’ve posted on other platforms, so long as you have the right to do so.
Sharing Drafts
At any time, you can share an unfinished draft with a colleague who has a Medium account by sending them your post’s draft link. They won’t be able to make changes, but they can leave feedback as Notes. These comments will remain private by default.
Publishing
Click “Publish” to make your post public. Your post will immediately show up or appear:
- On your organization’s profile page;
- As suggested reading on followers’ homepages;
- In followers’ notification streams.
Your post may also be sent by email to followers who have opted in, pushed to mobile apps, or displayed on a publication page.
Publications
Organize your posts by publishing them to publications.
A publication offers both a destination for people to visit and a feed for them to follow.
You can create publications for any theme or topic—your business, your industry, a particular initiative, etc. A few examples:
- G.E.’s Dare to Do features stories on imagination and curiosity.
- ESPN gave fans a platform to share their World Cup stories.
- Refresh shares research and insights on business networking.
You can also permit members of your team to publish directly into publications using their own personal accounts.
Distributing Your Stories
- Share on Facebook and Twitter. You can find share buttons at the bottom of every story.
- Encourage people to follow your company profile. They will receive a notification each time you publish a story.
- Embed your profile or publication on your company site. Instructions for embedding can be found here here.
- Promote your publications. People can choose to follow the publication if they do not want to follow the profile. Stories from a followed collection are distributed onto people’s homepages.
- A story will trend and get distributed more throughout our network if a lot of people are reading it at any given time.
Questions?
Check out the Medium FAQ, peruse the Help Center, or contact yourfriends@medium.com any time.
