Do You Play Medium?
When writing is not just writing.
I started to play Medium in May 2017. Or maybe I should say writing. At that time, it was only writing. And reading. A lot of reading.
It took almost five months before understanding.
My false start
In those five months, I read a lot. I actively followed other authors. I clapped/recommended unceasingly. I commented to support authors and to share my insights.
Writing, reading, participation. It was fun. Medium was so different from the rest of blogging and social media. I was so naïve.
Result: 40 stories, only 148 followers, a single Top Writer (more or less by pure chance), stats stuck around 2.5K/month. My 40th story, when published, got no readers.
The problem with stats is not addiction, or vacuity. It’s that they really matter. No exposure means no readers. No followers, no audience. Low stats tell that you are writing for yourself only. And this is rarely what you want, on the Web.
I was happy even for one interested reader, but only one is not enough to make a living as a writer if you need it. Worse, it’s not an audience. You lose the opportunity of a more substantial impact. And your words will die with you and your one reader.
Also, I saw many authors growing their audience, while I was stuck, even writing for many publications. My stories didn’t seem so bad, but nobody was seeing them.
Tagging
At some point, I started to notice the power of tagging. I began to pay attention to it and got four more Top Writers out of the blue thanks to it. Without changing my writing. Reading and commenting less than the previous months.
That was a signal, for me.
Tagging is hacking. A good hacking. There is nothing wicked, in tagging. But it’s not writing. It’s exploiting algorithms to gain visibility for your writing.
A tactic. Not necessary but useful.
Following
Tagging and stories were enough to get appreciation and Top Writers but were not enough to get followers. I write only 6–8 stories per month. That leads to a very slow so-called “organic growth.”
I couldn’t write more, without sacrificing the quality of my writing (at least in my opinion) but I started to notice the norm of reciprocity in a specific way. One of my friends, a successful blogger, confirmed that.
If someone followed me, I was induced to check their profile and their stories and, possibly, to follow them back. That worked reversely, of course. If I followed someone, they often followed me back.
That’s how initial growth is often boosted on the socials.
I didn’t want to follow everyone, but I started to pay attention to interesting profiles, from comments or claps, and be more open to follow them, while the previous months I had been very conservative.
I doubled my followers in one month in that way (from 148 to 290). Not because they saw my stories, but because they saw me following them. And then, they saw my stories.
A tactic. Not necessary but useful.
The game
I could go on. Facebook groups, visibility on socials, inbounding, etc. I don’t use many of these hacks, but if you do they help.
Hacks are not bad by themselves. They are tactics that increase your visibility. Insincere commenting is bad, in my opinion. Hacks are not. You need them if you want an audience as a blogger and don’t already have a fame at your back. You don’t need them all, but you cannot ignore them all. There are millions of stories, on Medium, and stories continuously flow in. Outside Medium, I would say billions.
Gamification techniques are generally used to improve individuals’ engagement in a context. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Anyway, any context with rewards and rules is subject to gamification. Some tactics work better than others. The door to hacks (and sometimes cheats) is open. Different strategies may work, but you cannot ignore tactics if you don’t want to be the last one in the game. There will be someone hacking the system and getting the visibility that you wanted.
In few words, I started to play the game. Because I realized that Medium is a wonderful platform and an excellent community, but it’s also a game. A demanding game. I can’t ignore that.
However, I’m not in the game. My growth will remain slow because of that. I won’t be a professional blogger. My choice.
But if you want your work to be visible you have to know the game and, at least in part, to play. And, in case you want to win the game, you have to play to win.
Originally published on The Writing Cooperative.
