Business writers rejoice. LinkedIn Pulse has introduced an overhaul of its publishing tools. LinkedIn is Medium-izing their tools.
Let’s take a side-by-side comparison of the publishing tools for these two sites as of September 12, 2016.
1. Getting started
LinkedIn knows that stories need photos and bold headlines. As you can see in Figure 1, LinkedIn makes adding the featured photo for the story easy. Medium (Figure 2) takes a more raw and hands-off approach to the start.
Figure 1: Starting a post on LinkedIn Pulse (above)
Figure 2: Starting an article on Medium (above)
Getting started: Slight edge to LinkedIn Pulse
2. Visuals and aesthetics
a) The basics
The fonts, line spacing, and aesthetics are similar between the two sites. LinkedIn uses a purple font color to indicate a hyperlinked text section, whereas Medium simply underlines the text. Confusingly, LinkedIn allows for underlined text.
Line and list spacing are similar. LinkedIn slightly indents their lists, whereas Medium left-justifies. Both sights underlined spelling errors with a red squiggly line.
Medium’s largest bolded text is slightly larger than LinkedIn.
Figure 3: LinkedIn text, spacing and aesthetics (above)
Figure 4: Medium text, spacing and aesthetics (above)
Visuals and aesthetics (the basics): Slight edge to Medium
Embedded content — visual only
We’ll get into the tools later, but for now, we’ll focus on how these two site handle embedded content and quotes.
b) Quote handling
LinkedIn (Figure 5) has one quote option. They enlarge, center, add a bar, and italicize the quote information. Medium (Figure 6) has two quote options. In the smaller quote, they add a bar, italicize and slightly indent the font. The larger Medium quote further indents the content, removes the bar, enlarges the text, and italicizes the font. Medium’s large quote option looks the best of the 3 options. If LinkedIn were to increase the font size and remove the bar, the quotes would look better.
Quote handling: Slight edge to Medium
Figure 5: LinkedIn quote and embedded content handling (above)
Figure 6: Medium quote and embedded content handling (above)
c) Embedded content
The images and video embedding between the two sites are very similar. The difference is in the embedded stories. LinkedIn has chosen to go with a large horizontal photo preview with more characters in the preview. Medium puts the image at the right of the text and uses a square format. In the example (Figure 5 and 6), the image handling works better on Medium. Interestingly Medium’s text preview seems to be too short, whereas LinkedIn’s seems to be too long. The optimum text preview length seems to be somewhere in the middle.
Embedded content: Slight edge to Medium
3. Publishing Tools
Ok, let’s get to the heart of the matter. We can see that visually and aesthetically, both sites perform admirably. In the past, Medium held a substantial lead over LinkedIn’s publishing tools. With the new LinkedIn Pulse release, that lead has narrowed. LinkedIn is more user-friendly, whereas Medium’s tools cater towards power-users who prefer keyboard shortcuts and a minimalistic approach to tools.
Figure 7: LinkedIn publishing tools (above)
Figure 8: Medium publishing tools (above)
a) Text manipulation tools
For Medium, the text controls will pop-up when the user highlights a text section. Additionally, a user can use the keyboard shortcuts to manipulate text sections. LinkedIn uses an omnipresent toolbar which is positioned at the top of the screen.
Text manipulation tools: Slight edge to LinkedIn
b) Embedded content tools
The newest improvement to LinkedIn’s publishing tool is the embed tool (the small screen icon with a plus as shown in Figure 7), which mirrors Medium’s version (a circle with a plus). When a user clicks on the embed tools, the user can easily embed content such as photos, videos and posts. For better or worse, Medium will auto-transform hyperlinks into formatted embedded content, as shown in Figure 6, if the hyperlink is on its own line. For example, if you were to type or paste a hyperlink like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjwZAa2EjKA on its own line in LinkedIn, the hyperlink text will show. For Medium, the hyperlink will automatically be converted into an embedded view. As a result, LinkedIn offers more control over which content is presented in embedded format. There are times when embedded views of reference posts can break up the post in a distracting way. In those situations, the simple hyperlink text is more desirable. An example is when there are a lot of reference links at the end of a post. The work around for Medium is to write a non-URL text line and then apply the hyperlink to the text.
Embedded content tools: Slight edge to LinkedIn
4. Advanced tools
Medium has a number of advances tools. Some are cool. Some are pretty. Some are useful. Let’s take a look at these unique tools and evaluate their usefulness and the difficulty for LinkedIn to replicate these features.
Figure 9: Medium’s advanced tools (above)
- Paragraph tool. Cool factor: high. Fun factor : high. Utility: medium. Difficultly to copy: low.
What is the paragraph tool? It is illustrated in the paragraph at the beginning of this section. Basically you can make a mega-large letter to start your paragraph. The tool makes you look like a pro. What your readers probably don’t know is that you are simply leveraging a cool Medium tool.
2. Customizable link title. Utility: medium. Difficulty to copy: low.
This tool is for professional users. The ability to customize the link title allows a blogger to leverage SEO while still allowing artistic license for a post title.
3. Customizable title and subtitle preview. Utility: low. Difficulty to copy: medium-high.
This tool is a quirky option. There are not many use cases where the title or subtitle for the post needs to be customized. For those wanting to control the post preview look, Medium offers this tool.
4. @ symbol quick-key. Utility: medium-high. Difficulty to copy: medium.
Medium makes it easy to @ other Medium members. The quick-key provides a useful reference list for this function. The resulting goal is to create more interaction within the Medium community. Although LinkedIn does have an @ mentions feature and inter-activity, there is no quick-key functionality.
5. Annotated text. Utility: high. Cool factor: high. Difficulty to copy: medium-high.
Annotated text is a hallmark feature for Medium. Medium goes beyond simple highlighting and allows a user to link comments to the annotated text. A commenters has the ability to make comments private. Private comments are only seen by the post publisher and the commentator.
Advanced tools: Large edge to Medium
5. Comments and Interactions
Medium has been working hard at improving their comments section. It is much better now. There is still confusing spanning logic though. In order to better understand why Medium’s comments are complex is to note that Medium treats every comment as its own “story”. As a result, if one comment has 3 of its own comments from 3 different commenters, Medium has difficulty in presenting these conversations. Medium currently spits these into 3 flattened conversations, rather that nesting the thread. An example of how one comment with multiple commenters spawns multiple conversations is shown below in Figure 11. See how Thom Garrett’s one comment has spawned multiple conversations. CONFUSING? Yup. That is a challenge that Medium is working on.
On the plus side, Medium’s annotated text notes are presented in the comments section. The annotated text and the comments are presented together (see Figure 11). This feature allows for hyper-specific topic conversations to take place.
LinkedIn has a more traditional threaded approach to its comments. Therefore, following the flow of a comment and all the subsequent comments in a single thread is strait-forward.
Credit Medium for experimentation and innovation in the discussion realm. The results have proven to be interesting, though sometimes messy.
Figure 10: LinkedIn’s comment section (above)
Figure 11: Medium’s comment section (above)
Comments and Interactions: Edge to Medium
Conclusions
This post is focused on the writing tools and aesthetic similarities between Medium and LinkedIn. A deeper and more complex discussion would be needed to compare distribution, community, content discovery, and subject-matter focus. Even as LinkedIn and Medium’s publishing tools and aesthetics converge, these sites continue to have very different content distribution and consumption patterns. For writers, especially business writers, there is an argument for publishing posts on both platforms. Now, LinkedIn has made this charter easier.
LinkedIn is hard at work making its publishing tools more writer-friendly. They seem to be paying close attention to their San Francisco neighbor. Writers who publish on LinkedIn and Medium are the winners. Medium has created powerful tools for blogging, and they offer a great aesthetic experience for their readers. LinkedIn Pulse now has the core tools and design elements to match Medium. There are still advanced Medium tools, especially the @ lookup tool, and the text annotation feature, that give Medium a leg up on LinkedIn. Perhaps LinkedIn will add those features in a future release. Medium continues to lead innovation in blogging tools, but LinkedIn is proving to be a capable fast-follower.
