New Blogging Platforms That You Should Consider Using

Medium

Created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Medium is a blogging platform that has exploded in popularity throughout 2013. Established only two years ago, Medium was started to encourage Twitter users to move beyond the 140 character limit and create longer, more engaging posts.

Medium itself is a beautifully designed website and is incredibly pain free. It has no publishing tools to learn and no widgets to distract you along the way; the perfect place to enjoy reading and writing. Medium focuses purely on content, removing any calls to actions for videos, or sign-up forms.

Whilst your existing on-site blog is key and should remain optimised and monitored, Medium can provide you with the freedom to create something unique that isn’t directly centred around your existing products or services. Think about creating some behind the scenes content, or talk about your roots and inspirations. Medium is full of CEO’s and startup founders talking about their lives and businesses, acting as a promotional tool to drive traffic to their existing websites.

Medium has a brilliantly simple CMS behind it, adding to it’s already fantastic appeal. With simple ways to add images, titles, subtitles and much more, it’s something that is destined to grow over the next few years. The on-site content is divided into collections such as ‘startups’, ‘tech talk’, and ‘all things music’, which makes it incredibly easy to put your content in front of the right people.

We love Medium at our digital agency, one of our directors James uses it regularly to post about his love of cooking. A few more of the Parallax team will be writing their thoughts in due course.

LinkedIn Publishing

Back in 2012, LinkedIn began to roll out their influencer program with the likes of Richard Branson, and Bill Gates sharing their various industry insights with LinkedIn users.

Originally starting out as an opportunity for these industry titans to reach new audiences and establish LinkedIn as a source of valued content, it’s now become available for all users to take advantage of.

LinkedIn will begin opening up their publishing tool over the next few months allowing users to follow users outside their network and gain followers of their own. Their announcement read “When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled. Every professional has valuable experience to share.”

The LinkedIn publisher will become more of a way to share your expertise with others. Why not give other industry professionals a reason to follow you by sharing advice, tips, insights and anything that may be shareable.

Exposure.so

As a platform that uses images to tell stories, Exposure brings something completely different to the table. Moving beyond the usual image upload, or embedding of YouTube and Instagram, Exposure is a tool that’s all about creating photo narratives. It’s a great platform that encourages the use of photos intertwined with text to help explain and link the visuals.

Visual media is loved across the internet, and if you’re a brand with a lot of visual assets, it could be ideal. As it’s such a new tool, brands aren’t using it, however it’s only a matter of time until it becomes a powerful marketing tool.

Check out the examples on the Exposure website, they’re really quite special.

Are there any new blogging tools that you’ve seen out there that we should try? Let us know on Twitter, we’d love to hear from you.