How to Engage with Medium Writers (And Why You Should)
Just in case you didn’t know.
I noticed something recently.
When I have a post that gets a lot of reads from outside of Medium (maybe Google sends it some eyes, for instance) it gets almost no engagement from readers.
For instance, I have a post I wrote a couple of years ago. It’s about a 1990s celebrity — someone that people are obviously Googling, but not many people are writing about, because Google sent nearly all of it’s 6400 readers to it.
And fewer than 30 of them clapped for it. Twenty-six to be exact. You can see that here on this screenshot.
The post above it on the screen shot has just a few more reads and 460 fans. Most of those reads can directly from Medium — meaning that Medium showed the post, maybe that the bottom of another Medium post for example, and someone clicked on it.
Big difference.
It seems to me that readers who are not regularly on Medium maybe don’t know how to engage with writers here, or maybe don’t know why it’s important.
So I thought it might be useful to write a little something about how engagement on Medium works and why it’s important to support writers whose work you enjoy.
The why first.
The biggest why is that engagement supports writers. If you’re a reader, hopefully writers matter to you.
It’s fucking scary to put your work out there in public for strangers to read. It’s hard. Writers are often caught between desperately wanting eyeballs on their work and feedback and all of that — and praying that no one they know will read what ever they’ve written.
If someone is brave enough to put their work out there, it’s an awesome thing to do to show them you appreciate it with some engagement in their post.
When you clap for a post on Medium, you’re letting the writer know that you read their words…
