How to Get Your Content Read on Medium

A guide to organic distribution

Built-in organic distribution to a network of engaged readers is part of Medium’s core value propositions to brands and publishers. But taking advantage of the “network effect” requires more than just a publishing strategy — it requires a social approach. After all, you can’t engage a social network without being social.

Content published on Medium sees, on average, a 38% lift in activity over content published elsewhere on the internet.

But how does the network effect actually work? Let’s take a look at the life cycle of a viral story.

Round one: press “publish”

The first round of distribution happens when a story is first published on the platform; at that moment, it’s immediately pushed out to the home feed of users along several different parameters:

Every user’s home feed is personalized — it’s generated by an algorithm that brings them content they will be interested in. This could include:

• The user follows the author of the story
• The user follows the publication containing that story
• The user follows one of the story’s tags

In order to get the most out of this initial moment of distribution, you need to maximize the number of users who your story could reach.

So, when a story is published on Medium, there are up to three separate audience buckets it can reach.

1. The author’s audience
2. The publication’s audience
3. The tag’s audience (you can use up to five tags on a post, so this bucket is actually five separate audiences)

As such, you can see why leveraging a publication can increase your organic distribution, as mentioned in our previous post — because publications drive distribution to two audiences rather than one. Since the home feed contains content published by people and publications, that means content published by a person into a publication goes to both sets of followers.

But keep in mind: getting distribution to two audiences necessitates that the writer’s audience and the publication’s audience are not exactly the same. We see maximum success when brands focus on building an audience for their publication — which you can bootstrap by connecting your publication to your brand’s Twitter account.

In addition to the quantitative boost, you also get a qualitative boost by having individuals publish into a branded publication, as stories published by individuals perform better than stories published by brand accounts. The human byline makes it feel more authentic.

If you have executives or leaders in your company who are active on social media like Twitter or Facebook, they are great individual voices to include in a publication. Have them create Medium accounts (if they don’t have them already) and publish from their own byline, rather than crediting them in text.

Brands can also sponsor writers and influencers to publish content in their publication — this is a great way to reach new audiences (and reach your established brand audience simultaneously).

Finally, make sure to use tags — assign five (the maximum number allowed) to each post, and pick broader, more popular tags, rather than narrower ones. When you start typing a tag into the box in the “Publish” dropdown menu, it will show you the number of posts that have been published with that tag in parenthesis. The bigger, the better.

Round two, ad infinitum: get social

The “network effect” comes into play when Medium users interact with content. Whenever someone recommends, responds to, or highlights a piece of content, that story is pushed to that user’s followers. Similar to other social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the social engagement that happens after a piece is published is rich with the potential for additional distribution.

So, get your social teams involved. Have as many individuals as possible get active on the platform. Find users who share your brands values and interests, and engage with them. Follow them, recommend their stories, even chime in to relevant conversations. This kind of engagement with the Medium network will drive activity on your content and help you grow your following on the platform. For more tips in this regard, check out this article from our Head of Community, elizabeth tobey.

Bonus round: email and curation

There are two additional drivers of distribution on Medium.

The daily digest email — this is an algorithmically generated email showing top content for a user. It is personalized based on who they follow and the tags they follow. It could conceivably contain content that writers they follow have published or interacted with, as well as content published with tags they follow. Out of that pool of content, the email will contain posts with high engagement — the most recommends or responses.

Curated content — this is a selection of content that is curated by our editorial team, which surfaces to logged-in Medium users. It appears to the right of their feed on medium.com, and on pages that are tabbed at the top of the home page. The editorial team’s selections are, as their team name suggests, completely editorial. We can nominate content for curation, but can never guarantee it.