Why you should post on Medium on employees’ accounts

When publishing a story on Medium, you have two options:

1. Have an account for your company and post there. It is the account type designed for individuals, but it has the company name and logo instead of a photo.
2. Let your employees have their own accounts, let them post there, and associate those stories with your corporate account.

This is how an article header will look like:

Company’s “individual” account on the left. Employee’s account with the corporate account on the right.

Which one to choose?

A corporate account that can aggregate your employees’ articles has a lot of advantages over an individual’s one:

• Customizable home page.
• Custom newsletters to followers.
• More detailed statistics.
• A cleaner URL: medium.com/the-company instead of medium.com/@the-company

Such an account is called “a publication”, and here you can read how it works.

Check out how neat the Flutter’s page is. You can have a menu of tags, social links and other external links. You can make the latest article large, and show others in smaller columns. Like a nice magazine:

Flutter’s corporate page.

Compare this to a boring individual account. Even my own posts do not catch me there:

So you definitely want a corporate publication.

And this means you will have articles on employees’ accounts, unless you want to look as confusing as Intel does:

You can see in their article’s header there’s just too much Intel to digest, four instances. This is because they wanted to have a corporate account with a nice home page, but not let their authors show their faces. So they have an individual’s account that reads “Intel Tech”, and then post articles from there to their corporate publication named “Intel”.

This separates their following, because some are on the individual’s account, while others are on the corporate one. A consolidated figure would look more impressive.

Also when someone wants to share “a link to Intel’s medium”, which one is it? What’s the entry point to Intel? You want to have exactly one for your company.

This also goes against the spirit of Medium, which is that texts are written by people, you get to know and love their style, and differentiate them.

Finally, this impacts the conversion rate, because you want to read a human’s story and not some self-emerged text. Just compare these snippets and imagine seeing them in the same feed:

If you would click on Intel, it’s only because you know the name. Given a less known company, you would likely click on a nice smiley face looking at you.

Intel has a reason for their choice, because their articles are scientific and are groups’ work. This is less true for an average company. But even for an announcement of a group’s work, the primary author can be shown. In Flutter, they take turns, and each new version is announced by another author; while in Dart, the same project manager makes all announcements:

Another reason to show your people is that they want visibility. They had life before your company and hopefully will have it after. They want a narrative of their own and followers of their own. Unless you let them post at least some articles on their accounts, they will be demotivated.

You can mention the author in the article text and put a link to their page, but it cannot compare with this beautiful header with the author’s picture:

As a company, you already get enough visibility:

• You are in the URL.
• You are in the header just below the author.
• Your logo is there.
• Your color theme is applied to the UI.

Give the people their candy.

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