How You Can Clap 200+ Times For A Story
4 updates on Medium, fake accounts, and one funny bug
‘A software bug is an error, flaw or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways’ Wikipedia
Recently, I already wrote a newsworthy and therefore very successful article called ‘How You Can Clap 100+ Times For A Story’.
In regard to claps and comments, it’s my most successful article so far with 2.8k claps and around 20 comments.
This is my follow-up post because I’ve discovered four more changes on Medium — one of them is a funny software bug.
1. Purge of fake accounts
You may have experienced that some of your followers left and went poof. Maybe you thought you must have said something stupid in your latest article. As far as I’m concerned, I lost about 30 followers. One day I had around 660 followers. The next only 620. I thought, wow my latest article about parenthood and sex life in the pub Motherload by Erin Hendriksen is that bad, huh? It’s a taboo topic!
A few days ago the Medium team announced that fake accounts have been tossed overboard in order to make Medium truly relational. What a relief!
We’ll be removing spam accounts from your follower and following counts across Medium starting today. (…) You may see a change in your follower and following counts. However you’ll gain a more accurate sense of your audience size now that follower counts only contain authentic, quality users. Rest assured — this change will not affect your distribution or earnings.
2. No follow-unfollow game anymore
Follow 300 people and maybe 100 will follow you back. Then unfollow them and keep repeating until you reach your desired number of followers. You may know this game from Instagram or even from Medium.
The result: 1k followers on Medium who don’t read a single line of what you pour your heart and soul into. Is this what you want?
In order to keep Medium authentic Ev and his team announced they will…
Accurately reflect(ing) your unfollow actions. (…) you can trust that your followers are authentic and engaged. (…) You can always flag an account you suspect of spam or other rules violations using our reporting tools for us to take a look at.
3. Multi-channel strategy
In order to grow your audience Medium recommends connecting to Twitter (Ev Williams is co-founder of Twitter) and other platforms, for instance, your own blog, podcast, or Facebook page, where you’ve already built or want to build an audience.
I’ve connected my Medium account with Twitter as you can see below on my ‘About’ page.
I share my stories on this platform. Moreover, I retweet articles from Medium pubs or fellow Medium writers who are on Twitter too.
4. Optimized bio
In order to grow, Medium suggests optimizing the personal bio on Medium ‘with relevant keywords’.
You can find your bio under ‘Settings’. It’s 160 characters long and appears on your profile page and next to your stories. Therefore, it’s crucial to optimize it with relevant keywords.
As you can see, I use the keywords: ‘Top Writer’, ‘Parenting’ and ‘Feminism’ since I’m two times Top Writer in these categories.
Additionally, Medium recommends publishing articles in one or two topics on a regular basis in order to increase discovery.
That’s what I’ve been doing since I’ve started my Medium journey in December. A few weeks ago Medium awarded me with a second Top Writer badge. I became a Top Writer on the topic ‘Feminism’.
For more information, click here.
My top stories are about feminist fatherhood and Jordan Shapiro’s new book ‘Feminist Dad’. The New York Times bestselling author is a writer on Medium. He saw my tweet on Twitter and retweeted it.
He read my story on Medium, highlighted it, and even clapped for it. Here’s the most successful story that made me a Top Writer in feminism with 1.1k claps and 16 comments so far.
5. You Can Clap More Than 200 Times
The App Experience, I’ve shown you in my initial article is still buggy!
On a mobile device with the (updated) Medium App, you can clap more than 200 times 👏🏻.
For instance, I clapped 200+ times 👏🏻 for an article by Patricia Rosa about Ev Williams who clapped for her story.
… and an article by Sean McBride about his trip to San Francisco👏🏻.
You can even give your own story up to 50 claps.
PS: When I wrote my first article about the software bugs, it was possible to clap 100+ times (‘How You Can Clap 100+ Times For A Story’). I’ve informed Medium’s engineering team about the funny bug.
Try it! It’s fun and there are so many stories for which I would love to clap more than 200 times.👏🏻 🙌🏻
‘Let’s get relational tags’ for the readers who commented on my first article and who may be interested in this one too❤️:
Carlos Garbiras KS Copeland Kristina Segarra Maria Rattray Checkmate11 Sharique Kamal Uchechi Ihebom Josh Balerite Acol Donna L Roberts, PhD (Psych Pstuff) James Michael Wilkinson Keith Dias Mario López-Goicoechea A Rustic Mind (Manali Desai) Barbara Radisavljevic Toya Qualls-Barnette Vishnu*s Virtues
