Medium vs. LinkedIn
by Yann Girard (author of The Bootstrapper’s Ultimate Bible To Social Media)
These days there are so many ways to push your content. Every few months there is a new platform popping up and honestly speaking it leaves me clueless which is the best one to use and which one to ignore.
So a few months ago I decided to test some of these more or less new content distribution platforms (even though I thought I’d stick to my blog forever).
My test included LinkedIn and Medium, some rather new platforms where you can easily distribute your content. My main goal was to increase my reach, get more followers and more eyeballs on my content.
As I noted in earlier posts (on my blog), it has become essential to push your content and not wait for it to be discovered. These days even the greatest content on planet earth will never ever be discovered.
There’s just way too much noise out there and hundreds of thousands of people, businesses, marketers and solopreneurs are trying to get their few seconds of customer exposure.
That’s why the push has become so important.
Without the push you’ll never be able to attract prospects any longer. Content without the push isn’t king. It’s probably not even prince anymore. Great content without the push has become pretty much useless.
Up until recently I was an advocate of sending people to a platform that you own (e.g. a blog) so that you’re able to own the customer relationship over time.
The more often people visit your blog the higher the probability that they subscribe to some of the numerous “subscription” options on your blog.
For instance on my blog there are probably 6+ options where readers can leave their email address (see here)!
Even though I’m still a big supporter of sending people to my blog, collecting their email addresses to then be able to send them updates (as well as sales pitches) over and over again, I have to admit that I have also started to realize the importance of diversification.
So I started to diversify and started to spread my content on multiple platforms at the same time. In this article I want to share the experiences that I made with Medium and LinkedIn.
I started LinkedIn round about two months ago and Medium maybe about one month ago. Here’s a quick look at the current stats of both platforms:
- Medium: published articles 7, views ~ 4k, internal likes ~ 80 (6 weeks)
- LinkedIn Publishing: published articles 11, views ~ 6k, internal likes ~100 (9 weeks)
If we break down to the numbers, both platforms are pretty much performing equally well, looking at the exposure per article.
For me, LinkedIn generated on average 540 views and 9 recommendations per article, whereas Medium results in 570 views and 11 recommendations per article. So they’re pretty much the same I would say.
Surprisingly, if we take a look at how the traffic developed over time it seems that LinkedIn traffic is rather decreasing (not to say looks kind of saturated) compared to the traffic developments on Medium where the traffic per post and engagement seems to follow no real pattern.
Now, it’s clear that this is nothing super empirical as I was posting different content at different times and all of this can easily just be a coincidence. But what is remarkable is the preference of different posts on different platforms, which we can clearly see (see pictures above).
But I don’t want to just look at the numbers here. I also want to share with you some of my findings, advantages and disadvantages that I figured out over the past two months. Remember, this is just based on my own experience and is not representative for everyone out there.
Medium Advantages
- Flawless integration with Twitter: all Twitter followers will automatically be added on Medium. I have about 20k followers on Twitter, which resulted in 2.8k followers on Medium (added automatically).
- Social Sharing: People tend to share a lot of Medium posts on Twitter, as well. Surprisingly most shares happen on Twitter and not on Medium itself. Hence a Twitter account seems absolutely necessary here.
- Comfortable E-Mail recommendation: Medium sends out weekly (or daily) updates per email with updates out of your network. This is very effective because most of the content on Medium is still considered to be of really high quality (so people actually like getting Medium updates).
Medium Disadvantages
- Needs a big Twitter audience: The strong integration with Twitter is also pretty negative. To me it seems almost impossible to get traction on Medium if you have to add people manually and don’t have a huge Twitter follower base that is automatically being synced. I have a huge Twitter follower base so I kicked off Medium with 1k+ followers without having had any content yet, which was really comfortable.
- Competition: The competition on Medium for attention is pretty brutal. Medium started off by giving early access to some of the best writers and bloggers out there. The content is almost exclusively of super high quality. That’s why I try to post only my most popular blog posts there (and most of them still don’t get any attention at all).
Medium Conclusion
Medium is a great additional channel to showcase some of your best work and get additional exposure and traffic for you and/or your brand. The biggest problem is to get some real traction on it.
If you don’t have a big Twitter follower base yet it might be pretty hard to build up traction organically. The easiest way would be to grow your Twitter audience first, collect your best performing blog posts and then get that thing going.
In case you have no clue about how to grow your Twitter follower base, feel free to grab a copy of my new guide “The Bootstrapper’s Ultimate Bible to Social Media: 20 Hacks that Take 5 Minutes or Less” where I explain how you can grow a huge Twitter follower base (among other things).
LinkedIn Publishing Advantages
- Existing Relationships: The fact that in almost all cases you already have some sort of relationship with the people you added on LinkedIn is a big plus. They already know you and your way of thinking so they’re more likely to click and share your content.
- Clean Timeline: As of today not a lot of people are actively using LinkedIn to post updates and so on. Therefore most timelines are less cluttered and people will actually see if someone liked someone else’s update. That’s a big plus.
- Notifications: As of today you still get notifications if people from your network post something using LinkedIn Publishing. That’s a really convenient way to get some initial eyes & traction for your content.
LinkedIn Publishing Disadvantages
- Too Personal: A lot of people are still afraid to add people they don’t know yet (which makes sense because you can see their entire CV). This hinders the acquisition of potential new readers/prospects dramatically, which leads to the next point.
- Saturation: The fact that the readership barely grows for non popular people (lack of trust, etc.) poses a next problem, namely saturation. Your LinkedIn contacts/followers will at some point be annoyed by your posts and simply stop reading your news. This results in an ever decreasing readership base (see image above).
LinkedIn Publishing Conclusion
I’m not quite sure whether or not the saturation effect I was experiencing on LinkedIn Publishing was just a coincidence, a temporary effect, a general problem of the platform itself or that my content is just not suited for the LinkedIn publishing platform.
I really don’t know. But I will definitely observe the LinkedIn platform a bit more and try to come up with more results at a later stage. Nevertheless it’s a great way to update your network about the stuff you’re working on (if it’s of quality of course).
Overall Conclusion
I feel that both platforms can add additional value to your overall content and social media strategy. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.
I will definitely continue using both platforms and try to channel both of them to other platforms (e.g. blog, Facebook, etc.) and bring its users onto a platform I can control myself.
My overall Content Push Strategy
In case you want to know how my overall content push strategy looks like as of today here you go (same content for all platforms):
- Publish article on my blog: rethinking the now.
- Publish blog post on my private Facebook account here.
- Publish blog post on my Twitter account: @girard_yann.
- Publish blog post on LinkedIn (including links to my blog & books) here.
- Publish blog post on Medium (including links to my blog & books).
- Go on Quora and look for corresponding questions and post my blog post as an answer.
- Publish blog post on my Quora blog: http://yanngirard.quora.com.
That’s pretty much how my entire strategy of publishing my content looks like. That’s my magic…
As of today, I have to admit that the majority of my traffic and email signups still comes through Twitter (other platforms are getting more traction though).
In case you want to know how I built my 20k+ strong Twitter follower base feel free to click and grab your report here.
Feel free to also follow me on LinkedIn here
