Whether or not your own brand posts on Medium, there’s a lot that this unique social media platform can offer marketers.
If you’re not familiar with Medium, it’s a platform for individuals and businesses to post long-form content. That could be anything from a short story, to an opinion piece, to a deeply technical blog post complete with graphs and charts.
For whatever reason, Medium isn’t always the first place we marketers think of to look when we’re searching for the latest and greatest writing about our field. However, the platform is home to some excellent users, as well as publications, that every marketer should be following.
Here are 10 @Medium accounts every #digitalmarketer should be following. Share on XAll Things Marketing and Entrepreneurship
The name says it all – this publication is all about marketing and entrepreneurship, although a quick skim over the most recent posts shows that it definitely leans more toward the marketing side of things.
Larry Kim, the founder of WordPress, is a prominent voice here, writing about content marketing, mobile digital marketing, and offering advice on building and running startups. A bonus: You’ll also find plenty of unicorn memes.
Another solid contributor is Joei Chan, whose pieces on SEO and email marketing are great reads.
Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin of the SEO marketing company Moz is an excellent, candid writer whether he’s writing about the latest changes in search marketing or his personal struggles with having to lay off a large number of staff from the company he founded.
One of the most helpful things about Fishkin’s writing is that he’s highly transparent about what it’s like running a digital company. He even posts actual numbers from Moz’s campaigns to illustrate what’s worked for them and what hasn’t, what they want to try next, and what they’ve scrapped.
Fishkin’s posts are not just informative, but deeply-felt – and that’s something special no matter what industry you’re in.
ThinkGrowth.org
ThinkGrowth.org is a publication by marketing software company HubSpot.
While there are plenty of helpful, informative pieces in this publication about inbound marketing, SEO, and content marketing, the real gems are to be found in the less straightforward subject areas: diversity, leadership, and building a business culture, for example.
ThinkGrowth.org’s contributors mainly all work with or for HubSpot, but there are some other voices on here too. The result is a strong, balanced collection of posts that can either help you develop a new skill, or give you something meaty and insightful to read on the plane to your next conference.
The Startup
This publication is all about – you guessed it – startups. Thanks to superstar contributors like Seth Godin and Josiah Humphrey, The Startup’s feed is always full of rock-solid posts. Some examples:
The Freelancer and the Entrepreneur: Which Are You? Are You Sure? by Seth Godin
Growing Startups When the Product Sucks by Ali Mese
A Quick Market-Driven Guide to Choosing a “Profitable” Start-up Name by Josiah Humphrey
Jay Baer
The founder of Convince & Convert, Baer’s Medium posts waste no time in getting to the point.
Take, for example, his post “Augmented Reality Beats Virtual Reality.” In a video (the transcript is included for those very few of us who prefer reading to video), Baer talks about the transformative power of augmented reality, which we can actually use while we’re out living our lives. This is as opposed to virtual reality, which is cool, but requires you to be relatively stationary and totally immersed. It’s just not very practical.
Baer has strong, informed opinions and a straightforward manner of communicating them, which can make for a refreshing pick-me-up during the 2 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon slog. In addition, Baer’s posts are usually fairly short – 3-minute reads, in general – so they’re easy to consume and digest.
Marketing and Growth Hacking
As you might expect in a publication with “growth hacking” in the title, there are some pretty incredible stories here. You’ll see blog posts by people who’ve gone from making $30K to $270K in a year, stories of epic failures turned into epic victories and plenty of other spectacular ups and downs.
This makes it a pretty engaging and entertaining read, and definitely one to check out if you’re looking for a bit of morning inspiration.
Stories by Buffer
For an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at startup culture, leadership, strategy, and more click through a few posts in Stories by Buffer.
This publication is focused more on offering insight into what the company has learned as a whole throughout its startup journey. That includes posts like “Does Unlimited Vacation Mean No Vacation? Some Ideas to Make it Work at Your Company” and “Why Diversity Matters in Technology.”
There’s also a healthy smattering of more personal posts from Buffer employees about things like becoming a better writer, or the company’s Chief Happiness Officer’s explanation of exercises to avoid “artificial harmony.”
Vantage
Visual marketers, as well as those of us who appreciate visual modes of communication, will find plenty to enjoy in this publication.
Vantage is dedicated to exploring visual storytelling and features lengthy, image-heavy blog posts about everything from being a commercial photographer to photographing survivors of war.
The focus isn’t on marketing, per se – but as digital marketing comes to rely ever more heavily on video and imagery, it’s incumbent on those of us in the industry to incorporate these visual mediums into our work.
NewCo Shift
NewCo Shift is a business and tech publication covering developments in Silicon Valley, politics, culture, and more.
It’s a great spot to find current, interesting, informative articles on big-picture issues, always written with an eye to the future. Some great recent posts include “Travis Kalanick, Radical Transparency, and the Rise of Glass Box Brands” and “Venture Capital’s Harassment Problem.”
Art + Marketing
Art + Marketing is hosted by ArtMap Inc., which is a San Francisco digital marketing and PR firm. The stories here are focused on the creative side of marketing, and offer opinions and information on social media marketing, web design, and more.
There’s even a fascinating section on the fake news phenomena, and how advertising is connected to its rise.
Once you’ve taken a look around Medium and followed some of these awesome accounts, think about your own Medium channel. Haven’t started one? Read this post, “6 Ways to Decide Whether Medium is Right for Your Brand.” And if you’re working on developing your Medium channel, try “6 Storytelling Secrets for Forging Connections with Your Customers.”
