The ‘Gram vs. The Medium
I recently went to New York and thought that it would be the perfect time to compare the advantages and disadvantages that Instagram stories and Medium series had. Although I use Instagram daily and post several stories throughout the week, I did find things that weren’t as practical. I had contemplated why someone would use one platform over the other, and decided to take them on in different ways to understand them both as separate and not similar.
Instagram Stories
I’ve used the stories feature within Instagram and typically post whenever I do something interesting and wanted to capture it in the moment. It’s also a great tool to get immediate feedback from the people that follow you, such as polls or Q&As.
While exploring the city, instead of consistently thinking of what I was going to post, I just went about my regular habits and posted as I would normally do. After the day I evaluated what I did and thought about the why’s. After that, I realized what my pattern was, I was posting about the big things I was seeing that other people would relate to and know because of how familiar it was.
I did this a few times and I didn’t even need to add much context because people would know just from looking at the images, where I was. I did a few boomerangs as well, but for the most part didn’t do anything other than post an image of where I was at the time.
Medium Series
I thought more consciously about how I wanted to approach this platform because I wasn’t familiar with it at all. I hadn’t ever played around with it to see what it offered, but the name kind of says it all. After the trip was over, I looked through my images and I noticed another pattern that had occurred, which was that I had taken tons of photos of things that inspired me as a designer. This consisted of architecture and most of all, signage and typography.
Doing it this way, is more an advantage depending on what type of audience you would like. Instagram is a bigger social media platform that your friends and family will be on and see the things you post, and they probably wouldn’t appreciate this type of thing half as much as peers would on Medium.
Thoughts and Conclusion
While trying to figure out Medium, it definitely was different because I was already familiar with Instagram. I didn’t feel that Medium was very customizable, or allowed much room for creativity. Although, you could create the content outside of Medium and input it in later, and it may seem like a lot of work, but it would be something I’d consider doing since it’s not just there for 24 hours and then disappears.
There is the argument that you could easily do this on Instagram and turn it into a highlight on your portfolio, which stays there for as long as you’d like and you can add to it and change whatever you need. If I had this in mind ahead of time, I could go into my Instagram and execute it in the same type of way I did on Medium. That is a downside and a reason why I wouldn’t keep using Medium series, because I’m already on Instagram so much, and I have an audience there that I know.
Ultimately, I’d use Instagram just the same as I used to, I think that being able to customize it is a big thing for me, and Instagram just allows for that better than Medium does. However, I can definitely see the advantages of using Medium series, and for portfolio reasons, I’d like to use it more.
