3 Ways You Can Support Diversity Together: A Starter Guide
The Diversity Together community presents an opportunity for you to share your ideas, insights, and stories with an audience that is passionate about diversity, students, and access to opportunity. To help foster an open dialogue and share knowledge with this growing community of recruiters, educators, and diversity practitioners, we launched this publication on Medium.
Before you get started, it’s important to understand that this isn’t just another Twitter, or Facebook. The platform is geared toward sharing longer-form, more well-thought-out content.
This guide will help you:
- Create an Account on Medium
- Interact With Diversity Together Content
- Write & Publish on Diversity Together
#1. Creating an Account on Medium
While it’s true that anyone can view Medium content (regardless of whether or not they have a Medium account), in order to publish and interact with folks on the platform, you need to have an account and be logged in.
Fortunately, you can create an account in less than a minute by going to Medium.com and clicking the “Get started” button in the center of the page (or the “Sign in / Sign up” link at the top of the page). From there you’ll have four different sign-up options to choose from: Twitter, Facebook, Google, and email.
My recommendation: Sign up for Medium using Twitter or Facebook so all of your existing connections from Twitter/Facebook who are on Medium will automatically be following your account once it’s created. This saves you the trouble of having to build up a new audience entirely from scratch. Also, regardless of the option you go with to start, you can always link your Twitter or Facebook to your Medium account later via the Settings menu.
The Settings menu is also where you can update your username/profile page URL. If you sign up with Twitter, your profile page URL, by default, will be medium.com/@YourTwitterHandle. But you’re free to change it. From the Settings menu you can also control what email notifications you receive from Medium. (You’ll learn about what triggers these notifications in the sections to follow.)
The other main things to remember when it comes to setup? Adding a profile photo and writing up a short (160-character max) bio for your Medium profile page. (Note: If you sign up using Twitter, your Twitter profile photo and bio will be automatically synced to your Medium account.)
Following People, Publications, & Tags
With a Medium feed, the content that’s surfaced comes not only from the accounts of the people and organizations you follow, but also from the publications and tags you follow. What’s more, when you search for content on Medium, people, publications, and tags all show up in the results.
Medium publications are collections of stories based around a common theme. Anyone can create them — yourself included — and the way they work is fairly straightforward. As the creator of Diversity Together, we’re an editor by default, which means we have the ability to a) add writers to our publication, b) edit and publish the stories that are submitted to us by writers, and c) review the metrics for all of the stories that are part of the publication.
#2. How to Interact With Diversity Together Content
Clapping, Sharing & Bookmarking
The “Clap icon” is the “Like” of the Medium world. It’s a way to show you that you appreciate the content that someone has shared.
When reading a story on Medium, there are two places where you can recommend it: At the bottom of the actual story …
Or the floating nav bar that appears to the right of the screen when you scroll through the story …
In either case, you’ll need to click on that “Clap” icon. Once clicked, the icon will change from an outline to solid green. To see the full list of people who’ve recommended a story, you can click on that little number you see next to the “Clap” icon.
When you applaud a story, the writer, by default, will receive an email notification. (But that’s something you can control in Settings). When ranking stories, Medium ’s system will evaluate claps users give out on an individual basis. You can clap up to 50 times per post, and you can use it to show the author how much you liked the story.
In the same two locations where you can recommend a story, you can also share that story to Twitter or Facebook, and you can bookmark the story for later reading by clicking the bookmark icon (which turns solid once clicked).
Once you bookmark a story, it will appear on your “Bookmarks” page, which you can access from Medium’s homepage.
Highlighting
In addition to recommending, sharing, and bookmarking Medium stories, you can unlock a second level of interaction by selecting a section of text with your cursor. Once you’ve highlighted some text, a pop-up menu will appear that gives you four options:
Clicking the highlighter icon will put a green highlight around the text you’ve selected, which is visible to your Medium followers. By default, a story’s writer will receive a notification when a section of that story is highlighted.
Response: Clicking the speech bubble icon will allow you to write a response to the story you’re reading. The section of text you’ve highlighted will appear at the top of your response.
Writing Responses
Unlike traditional blog comments, Medium responses are treated as individual stories. That means in addition to appearing at the bottoms of the stories you respond to, the responses you write are documented on your profile page, and have the potential to take off and get highly circulated just like traditional stories.
As a newcomer to Medium, writing responses can be a great way to engage with people on the platform without having to commit or write a story. It can also help you come up with ideas for your first story when you do decide to write it.
#3. Writing & Publishing on Medium
Formatting Text
From the Medium homepage, You can access the Medium editor and start writing or laying out a story: via the “New Story … “ link at the top of the page.
As you’ll likely discover, writing in Medium’s editor is highly intuitive and — from a stylistic perspective — nearly impossible to screw up.
By highlighting text, you can unveil several basic formatting options, including bold, italics, and hyperlinking. You can also designate text as an H1 …
And you can choose between two different styles of blockquote. Option A:
And Option B:
Of course, if you really want to get fancy, you can use Medium’s drop caps function. Know those enlarged, stylized letters you sometimes see at the beginning of sentences? Those are drop caps.
Another option for creating some separation between different sections of a story in Medium is to use a part, or separator. In order to insert one, you’ll first need to click that little plus icon that appears when you’re on an empty line of your story.
Clicking that plus icon will open up a menu with four options. The one on the far right — the icon with the two little lines — is the separator.
Here’s what it looks like on the page:
Adding Images & Media
Adding images, videos, and other media (e.g., tweets) to your Medium story can be as simple as copying and pasting their URLs into Medium’s editor. The editor, in most cases, can automatically recognize the media’s format and render it accordingly.
Alternatively, you can click on the plus icon to open the same menu you used to insert the separator in the previous step. From there, you can upload an image from your computer, insert a URL to a video, or insert the embed code to another type of media using the corresponding icons.
Depending on the specific size of the image you upload, you’ll have up to four different size options to choose from for displaying that image. These size options, which will appear in a pop-up menu after you insert an image, include left-aligned, center-aligned, wide (where the image width exceeds the width of the text) and full-width.
By default, Medium will display the formatting option that best fits the dimensions of the image you insert.
#3. Write & Publish on Diversity Together
When you’ve finished your story and ready to share with the Diversity Together Community, head up to the top nav where you’ll find two links: “Share” and “Publish.”
Clicking “Share” will generate a link to the draft of your story, which you can share with anyone — even if they don’t have a Medium account. And (as you can read in the screenshot below) the people you share the draft with will also have the option of leaving you notes.
Clicking the “Publish” button, meanwhile, will open a menu where you can select up to three tags for your story. Once your draft has been approved by the editors at Diversity Together, we’ll approve you as a contributor so we can publish your piece. Click Add to publication. Then choose and confirm Diversity Together.
Measuring Results
In order to see how your stories (and responses) are performing, you can go to the “Stats” page using the URL medium.com/me/stats. You can also navigate to the “Stats” page via the dropdown menu at the top right of the Medium homepage.
When you arrive on the “Stats” page, you’ll first see the aggregate number of views, reads, and recommends your stories and responses have received over the past 30 days. There’s also a graph that provides day-by-day granularity. By hovering over a column on the graph, you can view metrics for the specific day that column corresponds to.
If you keep scrolling down the page, you’ll be able to view the individual stats for each of your stories. Specifically, Medium provides data on views, reads, read ratio, and recommends.
Here’s a quick rundown on what those metrics mean:
- Views: The number of people who visited a story’s page
- Reads: An estimate of how many visitors read a story all the way through.
- Read Ratio: The percentage of visitors that ends up reading an entire story (i.e., the difference between reads and views). According to Ev Williams, this ratio is an important factor in determining how a story gets ranked/surfaced on Medium.
- Recommends: The number of recommends a story receives.
Anything we miss?
This was just an introductory look at how to join and engage with the Diversity Together community. Anything specific you’d like to learn about Medium or the community? Have any tips you’d like to share? Leave a comment below.
