Two Things You Should Never Do On Medium
Begging for Readers and Creating Tag Blankets
There are two irritating practices on Medium that I want to call out.
The first?
Tag Blankets
As Ryan Fan remarked in a recent Facebook post:
I love posts that tag like 500 writers — it makes me feel special for a second when I see I’m tagged, and then when I go in there are 499 other people tagged at the bottom!
I call this a Tag Blanket. You create a Tag Blanket when you tag a zillion people in a post, which is a trick to draw readers to your post, which is going to totally backfire on you, because how do you think a reader is going to feel when Medium notifies her that you’ve tagged her in a post, and she rushes to read it, only to find that you’ve tagged her along with 212 other writers?
She expects to find something personal that speaks to her or her work, and instead she’s just a tiny part of the mammoth green blanket of Medium writers you’ve created at the end of your post, on some kind of flimsy pretext, like inviting us all to respond to your exciting writing prompt, or thanking us for how inspiring we are.
All 212 of us!
That’s not gratitude or a writing prompt. That’s an transparent attempt to lure traffic to your work. And? A big fat waste of our time. The minute I see that vast green Tag Blanket, I close your post and move on, with a note to myself to avoid your work in the future.
The other Medium practice that is trying my patience?
Begging for Readers
I post an essay on Facebook. You respond with a generic “I liked this poet” Or “You’ve made some important points,” immediately followed by “Please check out my work,” with a link to your Medium profile.
If you post an insightful comment to something I’ve written (or even a cockeyed comment that makes it clear that you’ve actually read the thing) I’ll absolutely check out your work. In fact, I try to read the work of everyone who reads mine.
But when people respond to my work with a comment that’s just a pretext for posting a link to their work?
Hell will freeze over before I click that link.
I love Medium engagement. There’s nothing more fun than interacting with readers. But neither of these practices are genuine interaction.
You’ll do better on this platform if you cut them out.
(Another irritating Medium practice? Failing to credit the Medium writer who has inspired your post. THANK YOU, Ryan Fan, for the Facebook post that inspired this rant.)
Writing Coach and editor-for-hire Roz Warren, who writes for everyone from the Funny Times to the New York Times, can help you improve and publish your work. Drop her a line at [email protected]. (That’s Ros with an “s,” not a “z.”)
