Content Marketing is one of the most effective methods for a business to establish itself as an authority in its space. It not only enhances trust and credibility but also helps in converting leads to customers. At Marketing Fundamentals, we have been a big proponent of content marketing and how it adds value to businesses. Great content engages your audience, and helps you connect with them better. Your audience already knows you before they even become your client.
One of the biggest challenges businesses face today, is the ever growing noise of social media. Even if you have something valuable to say, how do you manage to reach your audience? How do you ensure that older businesses, who are early adopters of social media, are not getting all the visibility, even though they may be producing very low quality content?
Today, we will discuss about the new content curation platform Medium, which aims to solve this problem.
Medium since its early days has been subject to various definitions. Some call it a blogging platform, some call it a content management system. However, more than definitions, we should be analysing what Medium seeks to do differently in this already established space for blogging.
How is Medium Different?
Medium is trying to disrupt the way content management platforms have existed for long. Medium’s algorithm works in way, that seeks to provide quality over popularity. So, unlike most publishing platforms, which show articles in reverse chronological order, meaning the latest article on the top, Medium will only show articles that are most recommended and are of very high quality on the top.
The internet over the years, and social media in particular has been subject to manipulation by clever marketers. Marketers have been trying to control these media through garnering followers or being early adopters of a platform over the years. And they have been consistently pushing out low quality content to people.
If you are a new business or have recently adopted content marketing, or have something valuable to say, and do not have a huge social media following; how do you break away from this noise, and get people to read your content?
Medium is trying to address this problem. They are focussing on quality, on long form content which provides value to users and not just marketers who write catchy headlines as a click bait. It is democratizing the way real story tellers can compete with marketers.
Ev. Williams, co-founder at Medium (and also one of the creators of Twitter) had this to say in his Medium post:
“What we’re doing is ordering things by our best guess of the relative quality/interestingness of the different items—according to the people who have seen them… It’s not a direct popularity ranking. It takes in a variety of factors, including whether or not a post seems to actually have been read (not just clicked on) and whether people click the “Recommend” button at the bottom of posts. The ratio of people who view it who read it and who read it and recommend it are important factors, not just the number. (This is an attempt to level of the playing field for those who don’t already have large followings and/or a penchant for writing click-bait headlines.)”
What metrics work on Medium?
- Views: How many eyeballs your story receives
- Reads: Medium has an algorithm to detect how many people actually read your content
- Read Ratio: The percentage of the post a user actually read
- Recs: How many times the story was recommended by a reader
How can businesses leverage Medium?
As stated above, Medium is democratizing content creation and creating a level playing field with bigger, well established brands. So, even if you are trying to compete with bigger competitors, who have several thousand followers on social media, your content can still be found, read and recommended by people who actually value what you have produced. So, in the end storytelling wins, which is anyways the primary reason we produce content, isn’t it?
I hope this article will help you understand how to leveral Medium for your content marketing strategy.
If you’d like to talk to us about creating an effective content marketing plan for your business give us a call on +91 9008 639 690 or email us at raunak.guha@rankhigher.in. We are one of top 5 Most Promising SEO companies in India in 2014.
