What I Learned When I Got Brave and Shared My Medium Story
After I wrote my sixth story on Medium, I decided to share it on my Facebook account. Being a story about my first visit to a local concert venue, I knew it would interest most of my friends and followers. I felt really nervous to post my writing because it would be my first time sharing any writing in eight years, long before I knew most of my friends list. I’ve been writing for a long time, but it’s not something I have actively shared or promoted. Without a little feedback, I believe we all start off with a touch of imposter syndrome. I have 2.7K followers on Facebook, and I thought this would be a good experiment in creating engagement. To give you an idea of my average content, my Facebook profile consists mainly of videos and pictures celebrating and encouraging people to come out to live music shows.
I clicked Post at 9:41 PM and didn’t think about it again until I was falling asleep a few hours later. I checked, and… nothing. There were no reactions or comments. As I lay there falling asleep, I began mentally composing a new post, wondering how I could be in a picture with my sister that recently garnered 19K reactions, 1.5K comments, and 66 shares, yet I throw a story out and… crickets.
6:30 AM and I saw one reaction from someone very close to me, and then, in the following hours, the reactions began to roll in. Comments too, all really great ones that I could respond to to keep the reach up and connect to people that read the story. There were also shares and compliments.
When I started looking at the stats on Medium, I could see I was able to boost my views and reads higher than any of my other stories, but I did not boost claps, subscribers, or comments on the article on Medium. I was rather surprised by this until I discovered that one needs a Medium account to clap or comment on a story. Thus, I gathered that my existing Facebook audience doesn’t have a Medium account and likely won’t be creating one. I feel I need to note that I didn’t expect people to create Medium accounts, but I was curious to see if any of my existing followers already used Medium.
What Did I Discover in Sharing My Writing on Facebook?
Confidence — The positive response I got made me feel more confident in calling myself a writer. This alone made sharing feel like a win.
Inspiration/Motivation — Feeling like I had an audience made me more excited to keep on writing and filled me with ideas for more stories.
Discovery — This isn’t my reader audience. There are no Medium subscribers, and that’s not likely to change.
Naturally, my next thoughts are: how can I find or create an audience of people who will read and hopefully respond to stories on Medium? I’ve toyed with the idea of creating another Facebook profile where I can post links to my stories, but that feels like starting from the bottom. If you have done this, feel free to comment about your success or failure.
I’ve also looked into existing Medium communities on Facebook, but the ones I’ve come across seem to be more of a “Clap X amount of times, stay on the page for 30 seconds, and share your link here” sort. This process may get the stats to move, but I’m interested in feedback and places to share my own feedback.
Until then, I’ll be delving into other people’s articles about how they tackled using social media sharing for their Medium presence.