Medium Is Open 24 Hours a Day
Are you taking advantage of this reality?
The Experiment
I conducted a little experiment. I wanted to see if the timing of when I posted on Medium had any significant effect on the reception of said post.
So I posted yesterday afternoon. It was Friday, the end of the work week, with everyone winding down and going home from work. Ostensibly, it should be a dead time, one of the worst times to post a new article, right?
Sorta.
Overall, I surprisingly had pretty good engagement! Maybe it was the subject matter, but I had more than several people clap and comment. My views were good. And this showed something that others have talked about — the weekends are some of the best times to post, actually.
The Takeaway
But there’s a bigger point. You might have noticed this as well. Medium is open 24 hours a day. Let me say that again:
Medium is open 24 hours a day.
People are always on Medium, reading, clapping, commenting, looking for something to read. People are always posting. This is a site that never sleeps.
Take advantage of this. You must if you want to get read.
In the current iteration of the Medium algorithm, you need to post often. Many posts get buried (maybe to be rediscovered in the future, but you never know) and new material gets emphasized. Once I started posting multiple times a day, my engagement shot through the roof. And my experiment showed that there is no real dead time here. Every minute is alive.
So:
- Break up longer posts into shorter ones so you can post more
- Get ahead with your ideas, starting drafts of future posts whenever inspiration strikes so that you have a constant stream of quality content
- Post in the morning to reach the morning readers, post in the afternoon to take advantage of the afternoon readers (and those in other time zones), and post in the evening so you can wake up to a bunch of notifications
Like it or not this is how Medium is now. The goal has always been to share your stories with the world — if you want the world to read your stories, you need to share when they’re reading.
And right now that’s 24 hours a day.
Thanks for reading!
