Finance brands need to use everything in their arsenal to get eyes on their content. And in the ongoing battle to capture audience attention, LinkedIn Pulse and X’s Medium are two content platforms that brands are using to reach audiences and draw people to their owned media. But which of these will best suit your purposes? Here are some questions that might help you decide:
1. Do you want it to look and feel like a blog?
Medium is a blogging platform. It has a contemporary “bloggy” layout with lots of white space and allows more customisation of content so you can stand out. The LinkedIn interface is far more cookie-cutter social and business-y, and however hard you try with headlines and snappy intros, it will ultimately be more difficult to communicate “personality” if that’s what you want to do.
2. Do you have a lot of social followers?
If you publish content via Medium, your X account can be easily connected so your X followers who are also on Medium become your followers there too. You can also connect your Facebook account. So if you have a lot of fans this is a no-brainer, as long as the content you’re creating is something your readers will care about. With LinkedIn, you’d need to share the post with your X followers manually, and tweet it to LinkedIn channel editors who might feature it on an appropriate channel.
3. Do you want to build credibility within your existing business network?
LinkedIn is a community, not an anonymous mob. Most of the people in your network should know you, or at least understand what you do, so they’re more likely to read/share your content. Plus, publishing to this community, as well as commenting in a meaningful way on others’ posts and sharing other people’s content are all paths to earning trust, and turning it into business. You will have to commit time and energy though. Here, LinkedIn tells what content works best for finance brands and we explore how finance brands can win back trust through LinkedIn content.
LinkedIn is a community, not an anonymous mob.
4. Do you want to be discovered by new audiences?
With Medium, you can add tags that will allow you to be discovered by people browsing posts by tags. In LinkedIn, you are primarily communicating with people you already know, though you can reach connections of people in your network if your first-level connections share or like your post.
5. Do you have great stories but you’re not a CEO or an influencer with thousands of followers?
People say Medium is more about quality than pedigree, that it’s more democratic. If your brand has a good story to tell, you have an original viewpoint, and good content creators using the right voice and headlines, then the Medium algorithm will help your content rise to the top. (LinkedIn’s algorithm determines which “strong connections” within your network will be notified about your post, and has editors who help choose what content is featured, partly based on your organic reach. As you’d expect, it helps to have a large pool of first-level connections.)
6. Do you want to target the C-suite?
More than 467 million professionals are on LinkedIn, and 45% of its readers are in the upper ranks of their industries, with members self-reporting on things like job history, industry, title and level of experience. You can target sponsored content to recipients based on things like years of experience, job title and job seniority.
7. Do you want to publish content related to thought leadership?
LinkedIn is where this kind of content sits perfectly. In its own materials, LinkedIn says you should be sharing “professional expertise and experiences, industry trends and lessons learned”. Medium is also a forum for business, but it leans toward entrepreneurship, startups, culture, technology, politics and personal development.
Based on the above, you might think one platform sounds more like you, or you might decide you need to do both. Either way, don’t forget: you need to include well-crafted calls to action or have links within the article to additional content on your site where you have more control over how you convert.
Worried about being penalised by Google for duplicating content?
You’re not alone. Google did issue a statement saying that duplicate content won’t hurt you unless it’s got the hallmarks of spam (like dodgy guest posts or keyword stuffing). The rationale is they just don’t want to bring up the same content twice for one query so they consolidate and show only one version. In doing that, they try to choose the original source of the content.
This doesn’t always work, so sometimes your article on Medium or LinkedIn does better in search results than the version on your blog. Only you can decide if that’s a problem or not. Do you want more readers or more control?
If you’re still worried, you might try writing complementary or related content for the social platform instead of duplicating an article, and link back to your blog; or write shorter versions of your articles and link back to your blog for the full read.
