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Article Marketing / Communications 1 min read

Membership Hack: The Right Medium for Maximum Reach

The Fiber Broadband Association uses a platform called Medium to blog about industry news, information, and advocacy. With millions of users, it lets FBA distribute content far and wide.

Heads up: this content is over 5 years old, so some information may be out of date.

How to hack it? To start a blog for your members, you don’t need a big budget or large team of dedicated staff writers and editors. It’s more important to know how to tell a good story and to use the right medium to share it.

The Fiber Broadband Association uses a publishing platform called Medium  (opens in a new tab), a free tool with more than 60 million active daily users, providing access to an audience for content on almost any topic. “Medium also has a large number of built-in users whom we might not be able to reach by simply posting [to] our website,” says FBA President and CEO Lisa Youngers.

Why does it work? FBA’s blog, Fiber on Fire  (opens in a new tab), delivers a stream of information to members succinctly and quickly. Most posts are less than 500 words, and the content varies week to week. “We share member updates, new research, and our opinion on public policy issues that impact the fiber industry,” Youngers says. But it also works well for longer-form content, like this post  (opens in a new tab) detailing several advocacy goals and objectives.

What’s the bonus? Medium can also be configured as an extension of an association’s web and social media presence. FBA embeds Medium content in a homepage sidebar. Meanwhile, it’s “incredibly easy to use and integrates well with the other social media platforms we also use on a regular basis,” Youngers says.

(NeONBRAND/Unsplash)

Tim Ebner

Tim Ebner is communications director and press secretary at the American Forest & Paper Association in Washington, DC. He is a member of ASAE’s Communication Professionals Advisory Council and a former Associations Now senior editor.

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Tags: #Communications #Marketing #Membership #Social Media

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