What You Need to Know About Publications

How to create a destination for your brand’s content on Medium

Publications allow you to grow your brand’s presence on Medium beyond a single account. Publications are essentially content hubs that allow posts published by multiple accounts to live in one place — basically branded umbrellas for stories from several individual voices. They have a wealth of features that accounts don’t have, such as:

• Allowing brands to have individuals — employees, execs, influencers, partners — publish from their own byline
• Microsite functionality, including a customizable homepage and static navigation bar
• More real estate for branding elements such as logos, imagery, and color palette
• A fully functional CMS for teams, in which writers and editors have distinct privileges
• More organic distribution inside the Medium network (we’ll cover this in great detail next week)
• A much faster time-to-value than creating a custom website — there’s no code involved in the creation flow, and it’s completely free to use
• Custom domains — any URL you own, you can use for a Medium publication
• Letter functionality that allows your brand to reach followers of your publication in their email inbox

A few use cases

Brands can leverage publications in a myriad of ways — but at a high level, publications are built for creative, collaborative content. Here are some examples to illustrate the possibilities.

Supporting a specific marketing campaign. REI launched a publication in November 2015 as part of their “Opt Outside” initiative, in which they made the radical decision to close retail stores on Black Friday. They had a variety of individuals and organizations contribute stories to the publication — from managers of local retail stores to executives at nonprofits to other companies who share their brand values — about what opting outside meant to them. Their top post, written by a popular adventure photographer, garnered more than 500 recommends — driving awareness and positive sentiment around the campaign.

In lieu of a company blog. An increasing number of brands are migrating their blogs to Medium in order to capitalize on the network effect and eliminate the cost of custom development work. (Quincy Larson of Free Code Camp, who recently migrated their blog to Medium, sums it up best: “We got significantly more views in the past 90 days on Medium than we got in 18 months on our blog.”) Slack, Google Ventures, and Weber Shandwick are also great examples of companies who have fully migrated their blogs to Medium.

As a space for the personalities who shape your company. Facebook’s design team has their own Medium publication in which designers give a behind-the-scenes look at their processes. Similarly, Google’s development team has a Medium publication ‘by engineers, for engineers.’ By showing the human side of large, high-profile companies, these publications have become important recruiting tools.

As a content destination for big brand initiatives. We’ve partnered with brands to create publications for large-scale initiatives that have spanned 6+ months. These programs come to life as glossy digital magazines, complete with high quality (often custom) art work, and influencer bylines. Some examples include Re: Form, in partnership with BMW; Gone, in partnership with Marriott; Technology Next Dimension, in partnership with Intel; and The Future of Money, in partnership with SoFi. These publications are great role models that illustrate the creative possibilities for brands on Medium. Visit our Brands page for more information on creative partnerships.

The Brass Tacks

Creating a publication is quick and easy — no code required. Our tools are all “What You See Is What You Get” and you can mix and match the settings to create a unique home for your brand’s digital content. This documentation from our support team explains how to get started. We suggest creating publications from a brand account, rather than an individual one, as the account that creates the publication has special privileges as “owner” of the pub — namely, the ability to connect the publication to your brand’s Twitter account. Twitter Connect will allow all of your followers on Twitter to auto-follow your publication on Medium (provided they also have Medium accounts).

As part of our Medium for Publishers announcement on 4/7/16, we released a new suite of tools to make publications even more robust, from both a functionality and design perspective. This article from elizabeth tobey, our Head of Community Engagement, explains how to make use of these new tools.

Creating content is great, but what you really need is people to see it. Next week we’ll tackle organic distribution on the platform and how you can drive eyeballs to your content.