Medium vs Twitter

Comparing Two Very Different Social Media Giants

Medium vs Twitter? At first glance this might seem like a very odd comparison. After all, these are two very, very different social media platforms — how can it be possible to make any useful comparisons between the two?

And yet that is exactly what I’ve found myself doing recently. I’ve been on Twitter for years and I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I’m a bit of a Twitter addict — I suspect the same goes for most of the people reading this article. I’ve always been drawn to the ease with which you can get your message out quickly and easily to a lot of people. But lately I’ve been spending more time getting to know Medium and the more time I spend here, the more I like it.

Twitter is by far the bigger platform, with around 200 million users active every day. By comparison, according to a quick Google search, Medium has a ‘mere’ 60 million active users per month. Follower counts on Medium also tend to be lower than on Twitter, but from what I can gather, those followers tend to be more engaged generally than many of your followers on Twitter will be. This is great news if you want to engage more deeply and really make people think.

A lot of businesses use Twitter as a form of brand promotion more than anything else because it’s great for reminding people that you exist. It’s also a good way to make announcements — to tell people about a new product, an offer or a competition, for example.

For people like myself, who aren’t running a business as such but are promoting a cause (in my case veganism/animal rights) Twitter can also be a great way to keep that cause in the forefront of people’s minds, share the latest news and remind people about the issues. There’s no doubt that Twitter can certainly be a very powerful platform for certain types of content or campaigns.

But whilst Twitter’s 280 character limit lends itself perfectly to short, snappy tweets and responses — and is therefore notoriously addictive — it can sometimes feel a little shallow, a little frantic, a little repetitive. And although it’s relatively easy to get thousands of followers, many of those are likely to be following you only to get follow-backs so a fairly high proportion of your overall followers could be…