Feb 27, 2018
Find better Medium tags for your stories
Update 18 January 2019
RIP mediumtags.com, Costing me bucks on AWS, decided not to run it anymore. Though I have old data, will sell it if anyone needs it. It has around 7000 tags. Reach me at gaurav@coinmonks.com.
Update (14 Jan 2019) — Recently medium updated it’s API's, no more follower count. Preserving old followers data. Post count data is unchanged and get updated regularly.
This is problem with centralize platfroms, they are never made for eternity. Companies created Data silos and now chewing off profits from it. Data should not be controlled in centralized server for making profits. Free access to data should be everyone’s fundamental right.
Hail Decentralization!!
cc Ev Williams (You killed Medium tags)
Tags play an important role to reach out your audience and BOY! they are important. Below is an image from the article titled Introducing Tags: Increasing connectivity between ideas from the medium blog.
I am going to show you another image from the article titled How to get published in the freeCodeCamp Medium publication by Quincy Larson.
Now I am going to tell you a secret that even FreeCodeCamp doesn’t know, #tech has more Post count, which medium shows when you type for tag search, but #technology has more followers. So if you are using #tech and not #technology, you are not reaching almost 50% audience which reads articles about technology.
Though there are other criteria which make stories trends but after seeing this piece of information, at least I am going to use #technology tag on my tech articles.
Another example where #ai has around 4k followers but artificial intelligence has 674k followers.
So we made a simple tool (https://mediumtags.com)to explore these tags and help you to decide which tag has more readers.
About the Tool:
The tool is using a medium Jsonp api, which gives data about post and followers. We are also storing this data, so in future, we can go in-depth with this data and analyze what people are following which tags. Currently, tool shows these points.
Rank — Based on number of followers
Followers — number of followers of a tag on medium
Post Count — Number of post count for the tag on medium (This is what you see when you search tag on medium).
Followers per Post — Number of Followers for tag / Number of Posts for tag
How tool will help you :
Followers per Post is very important. High followers per post value indicate that there is higher chance to attract readers in that category.
For example look at the ratio for two tags.
#life lessons — 5.57 (Followers — 1078464 , Total Post — 193716)
#life - 4.80 (Followers —1063013 , Total Post —221312)
This tell us that every post with #life lessons tag has average 5.57 followers and 4.8 average followers for #life tag. So if you are using #life tag you are reaching 1 less follower in this category.
Top Tags-
This tool also shows you top tags based on Followers per Post. So if you are thinking about your next medium story and want to reach a bigger audience. You can check what are the top tags and write under those category.
If you want to read more about tags check this great article by Florin Badita.
Check it out and let me know, if it helped you. If you have any feature request around these tags or how it can help you more, write in the response.
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