Multilingual content management. A challenge that faces bloggers and a punch for Medium.

It’s been a while since I started to contribute my posts to Medium. Whatever you say, this blogging platform is the best I seen so far. As a marketer with a focus on Growth Hacking and Content Strategy, I found Medium as the best platform for readers outreach and communication with followers.

There are tons of benefits Medium brings to you, but is it useful when you intend to post in multiple languages?

So far, I found only Tumblr, who is offering several publications under one account, which can be tweaked to specific language. Means your posts will never get messed up and English speaking world will not get annoyed by Chinese, Spanish or any other language posts.

But is Tumblr good for blogging?

Answer is yes and no.

Tumblr is great place if you share food, kittens, media stuff, run personal mini-blog or just post for fun. That’s also a great supplementary platform to bigger audience outreach, with its shared links option to original posts on your other blog, let’s say Medium or self-hosted. But Tumblr is not something what I will expect when starting discussions on something important. It’s like an Instagram for me, just more advanced.

You can read my thoughts on other social blogging platforms here:

A challenge to keep readers engaged on multilingual blogs.

It’s not just a challenge, but a pain and lots of questions “why my audience is not growing?”.

Imagine you have a Medium account where you post from your name. It’s your identity and keeps attention on your personality. You post, you import posts from other sources, you communicate with other bloggers. Sounds good so far…

I post in two languages: English and Ukrainian.

Sounds great, right? I have audience who is interested in reading my posts in both languages, but here is a catch.

When English speaking reader goes to your page and sees Ukrainian content, he simply ignores it first time, but when he comes couple more times or more, if he receives notifications about your posts to email or social media accounts you simply lose your reader.

This happens not because you are posting something off topic, no. It’s just because reader doesn’t understand you. As a result — they unfollow you, unsubscribe, and just forget about you.

To keep readers engaged we should always remember about two most important criterias: relevance & localization.

What Medium should take in action, to make users not to look around for other services.

• Option to choose a language for posts and publications.
• Option to sort stories by language for easier navigation and management.
• Option for users to browse Medium only on specific language.
• Possibility to use multilingual tags, not only Latin.
• Convert automatically Cyrillic links to posts or publications to Latin symbols with transliteration.
• And finally, make multilingual HowTo and Q&A.

Nothing is perfect and there will be always bunch of features that are lacking, but supporting bloggers on making their content relevant can be a huge jump for Medium to overtake market share among other platforms.

Hope it will happen someday. ;)