As a relative newcomer to Medium, here’s what I (albeit anecdotally) have found out about getting good stats. If anyone has anything further to suggest, or any points of disagreement, I would love to hear them!
Golden rule: engage, engage, engage!
The best stats will be on days where you have communicated with others a lot more than you have posted your own work.
No matter how much you publish, whether it be new material, or existing work of yours, it counts for very little.
It doesn’t matter how many pieces you have, or how many keyword tags they have, or how judiciously you choose your tags; it’s completely counterproductive to post a lot of work in a short period of time.
Whether it’s purely because you are wasting time you could be engaging with other people’s work, or whether there is an algorithmic penalty (these two possible reasons are hardly mutually exclusive), I don’t know.
If there were such a penalty, I doubt Medium would broadcast it.
But just be sensible, and remember this is not a personal blog. It is a ‘community,’ in the non-patronizing sense of the term.
Timing
I don’t know for sure about Twitter or Facebook algorithms; but again, try and space ’em out! Remember, there is a ‘draft’ function. So you can always return in an hour or two for your next piece and stagger them throughout the day.
Keyword tags
Keyword tags are tricky.
On the one hand, Medium doesn’t allow you to load your pieces with keyword tags, which is good.
However, we all need to think about whether to go for keyword tags which are very popular, or ones which aren’t very popular.
As someone who isn’t huge on Medium (as things stand), I’d be inclined to start off with less popular ones, in order to stand out a bit more.
A few examples (guessing here without consulting the stats):
‘Liberal’ is going to be a tough one. Try ‘liberal thinkers’ or ‘liberal journalists.’ Again, instead of ‘conservative,’ try ‘conservative philosophers’ or ‘conservative media.’
Slow down!
Try not to be too much of a ‘power user.’ Other folks on Medium have said they’ve had warning messages from overusing the heart button.
I assume the same might be the case (at least as a hypothetical possibility) for other actions, other than the heart button; but I am not so sure about that. I’ve not had these problems, but it’s worth thinking about.
NOTE: This last bit was written before the heart button was replaced with the clap function. I don’t know if this is still a problem with the new system!
So, there we are! Interested to hear your thoughts.