Why You Should Have A Publication On Medium
Whether you’re a person, or a brand.
In a world overwhelmed with content you need to make it easy for people to find what they’re interested in. No one will pan for gold in a dirty stream if the nuggets they’re after are easy to pick up on the shore. Having a publication on Medium helps make your own stream clearer, offering much better options in presenting and organising content. In contrast Medium’s navigation options on regular accounts are downright terrible. You can tag a single post at the top and after that it’s filtered by what was published most recently. That’s it. No easy navigating by content type. No options on creating an interesting look to the page. It’s just your short profile blurb and image, with a scroll underneath. There are some tabs to help toggle between whether something is an actual story, or things you’ve recommended, highlighted, or responded to. But, that’s not particularly helpful if someone comes to your page looking for a certain type of story.
In contrast ‘publications’ have plenty of options on how to deliver content. You can feature up to 25 posts in an image grid, or choose to feature four and then have a scroll below. That scroll can then be sorted by ‘latest’, ‘trending’ or ‘featured’, where you choose the order people can read things. The way Medium have done this is presented in a clean way that is very easy to change. Even for someone as design challenged as I am, it’s hard to mess up. You can also help people navigate stories by sorting them under tags, and then filing them under a tab menu. Talk about making it easy for your readers.
This kind of navigation is really important for people who come to my own Medium page, because I tend to write about a wide range of subjects. Right now, my personal feed isn’t very cohesive at all. If someone was looking for a short fiction story, they’d probably be scared off by all of the recent posts about my wife’s battle with cancer. But, if you switch over to my publication, things become a lot clearer. You can select what you want to see and filter out the rest. If you’re curious about what else is in there, it’s also easier to take a look around.
If you happen to be a brand, this kind of customisation is even more important. Most brands have at least a couple of content pillars they base their messaging around. It keeps the brand interesting, multifaceted and improves their appeal to a wider audience. Unless you’re a one trick pony pushing the same thing all of the time, it’s impossible to create a seamless user experience for your customers using a regular Medium account. Instead, you should think of your Medium page the same way you think about structuring your company website — Easy to navigate. Clear messaging. Pleasing design.
Another bonus of becoming a publication on Medium is the Letters function. Letters lets you create a newsletter to send to your followers, highlighting the different stories you’ve recently posted, guiding people in the right direction of what they might want to read. This Buffer post suggests that conversion rates on Letters is really strong. So it could be a powerful tool in having existing customers/readers see relevant content they would not have otherwise found. Again, this is an option you don’t have as a regular account.
There are a few brands I can see on Medium already taking the publication approach. Slack and REI both have great looking pages. Contrast that with Patagonia who are a brand with 20,000 followers, but have a pretty lacklustre experience if you land on their profile page.
The big drawback of switching across from a personal account to a publication is that your current followers don’t automatically come with you. If you’re a brand like Tesla and have 72,000 followers with no publication yet, it makes that decision to make the shift a bit harder. Even Slack seem to have had issues with this. Their regular profile has 96,000 followers, but their publication only has 6,200. This from a brand that seems to be doing it better than most. There are some ways around this. You could write a post alerting your followers that you’re making the shift to make their reading experience better. You can then pin that post to the top of your regular profile, asking people to read it first, before scrolling through the rest of your stories. But, not everyone will read that post, and it’s a roundabout way of leading people to where they really need to go. If you’re gathering Medium followers by linking to your profile via your website, then it’s easy enough to change that link and have people land on the publication instead. Still, that doesn’t solve the issue of moving your existing followers across. It’s important to note that you’re not losing these followers, and they’ll still be able to read the content you post via your regular account, even if they don’t read the publication. So, in the end the drawbacks are small. The upswing is you’re offering a better way to for people to digest your whole catalogue of Medium content, if they’re wanting to dive in.
Considering how much better it is for followers to navigate content using the publication format, I’m a bit baffled that Medium don’t open this formatting option to regular accounts. It would solve the issue for brands and people who only post via a single log in, but still want the option of presenting their content in an easy to digest format. Of course, Medium may open things up in the future if there’s enough demand (if you do want this usability, highlight this paragraph, or comment and tag in @Medium so they know what’s up).
However for now, if you’re wanting to give your readers a better experience, make the shift towards being a publication. The earlier you make the change, the faster you can move towards growing your followers in a way that makes it easier for them to hear what you’re trying to say.
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