Track Medium Follower Growth and Social Graph Snapshots

Follower count is vanity. Useful products measure velocity, who follows whom, and superfans on hit posts.

Tool outcome: A medium_social_snapshots table + one SQL query for week-over-week growth.

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What to measure

Metric	Endpoint	Use
Follower velocity	/user/{id} + weekly snapshot	Creator dashboards
Following graph	/user/{id}/following	Discovery (“who do they read?”)
Superfans	/article/{id}/fans	Outreach lists

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Snapshot job (pseudo-ETL)

const API = 'https://api.zenndra.com';
const headers = { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ZENNDRA_API_KEY}` };

async function snapshotUser(userId) {
  const profile = await fetch(`${API}/user/${userId}`, { headers }).then((r) => r.json());
  const followers = await fetch(`${API}/user/${userId}/followers`, { headers }).then((r) => r.json());

  await db.query(
    `INSERT INTO medium_social_snapshots (user_id, captured_at, followers_count, following_count, sample_follower_ids)
     VALUES ($1, NOW(), $2, $3, $4)`,
    [
      userId,
      profile.followers_count,
      profile.following_count,
      JSON.stringify((followers.users ?? []).slice(0, 50).map((u) => u.user_id)),
    ]
  );
}

Run weekly—not hourly—to respect rate limits and because trends are slow-moving.

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SQL: week-over-week growth

SELECT
  user_id,
  captured_at::date,
  followers_count,
  followers_count - LAG(followers_count) OVER (PARTITION BY user_id ORDER BY captured_at) AS delta
FROM medium_social_snapshots
ORDER BY user_id, captured_at DESC;

Join to your product’s users table when Medium writers are also customers.

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Alerting

Alert when delta = 0 for four weeks on an account you monetize—often a content cadence problem, not infrastructure.

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Keywords

medium follower analytics, medium api followers, creator growth dashboard, medium social graph.

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Further reading

• Kimball Group: slowly changing dimensions for snapshot modeling
• Zenndra: Track Medium audience and followers