Sometimes we get asked the question of why a certain post didn't receive a high amount of curation rewards. Typically, there could be a number of different reasons as to why a post hasn't been chosen: perhaps the person is frequently posting and already receiving high rewards, or perhaps a persons general engagement within the community is rather low to justify higher rewards. However, the main reason as to why someone may be left curious as to why they didn't get curated is down to presentation and effort.
In this post, we'll be taking a look at the general presentation and effort that we'd like to see in your posts, and provide you with a checklist of certain criteria that we generally follow prior to curating your content. Not only will following the content in this post increase your chances of being curated, but should increase your likeliness of attracting others here on Hive as well.
I, @namiks, will also provide some visual examples from my own posts that you may see for references going forward.
Presentation
The first thing people will notice about your posts is the thumbnail: the very first image in your post that people will see when roaming through their feeds here on Hive. As you would expect, you should aim to make your thumbnails as appealing as possible so that people stop at your posts and click on them to find out more regarding the subject. We see many posts in which the thumbnail is a low resolution poster for the film they're reviewing, which gives the rest of the post a bad look even when the text could be excellent. Sadly, this encourages us to prioritise the posts that do have better quality images in their posts.
This brings us to our next step: how do you improve the images in your posts? Well, this is rather easy for the most part. The majority of people will be watching their movies and television shows from a streaming service. This means that you'll be capable of logging into them on a device capable of taking screenshots: desktops, smartphones, tablets, and laptops. From there you can choose key moments within the movie or television show that appeal to you, and may be of interest in your writing later on.
By taking and using screenshots, your post is not only going to be more appealing to your potential readers, but will have a significantly better level of presentation and formatting. Your subject will be more appealing, and more direct in telling your readers about the very thing you're discussing. Not only does this tell your audience more about the subject, it displays to them that you've taken the extra effort to visually convey interest in that subject.
Take into consideration the scene, what's happening within it. Find moments that appeal to you either through the narrative or visually. Interesting screenshots that show beautiful composition and use of colour will hold more weight than those taken at random intervals.
With images, it is entirely your decision as to how you place them around your post. This isn't something we take too much consideration of, since the formatting of the post's text itself differs from each person's style of writing. Though, we do recommend that you use multiple images in your posts, for it can serve as a break between your text as you change to different areas of interest within the subject. These breaks allow your audience to breathe and slowly take in the information, rather than being greeted with an overwhelming wall of text.
Effort is something that can be broken down into three main areas: post length, context, and style. These three areas come together to create some very fundamental aspects of writing structure that results in a finished piece that is informative, entertaining, and well written. To break things down more visually, here is a general template of post structure to follow:
- Introduction: the foundations to the post and subject.
- Context: the narrative description.
- Opinions: your thoughts.
- Conlcusion: the end of the post, final thoughts.
We welcome our readers into the post by providing them with some slight pieces of interest about what the post is regarding. We can tell them how we found this subject, why we are to write about it. From there we can begin to provide some context about that subject as we dive into elements of narrative and characters for the readers to understand; this sets us up for the areas of our piece in which we provide more personality and depth by voicing our own opinions. What did we like about certain scenes we've discussed? What did we dislike? Did any scenes or performances encourage the audience to think or feel certain emotions? And after, we can finalise our thoughts and bring our piece to an end.
It can be very important that we do not fail to provide strong opinions that dive deep into our subject. People are ultimately not all that interested in seeing a general synpopsis of a movie or television show, but instead are interested in your thoughts. Opinions can also extend beyond simple thoughts of whether you liked a scene or not, but can take a deeper look into the filmmaking behind the subject itself: why did they choose certain colours? What difference did the tone of lighting have on the story? How did this change the dynamic of the scene? Alongside the aforementioned screenshots you've taken, this also encourages readers to engage with you and your post by providing their own thoughts on the matter.
This also helps to again encourage people to check out your post: is your post's title engaging? Perhaps summarise the post with a few words and add that to your title. Tell people what your post is about! You can see an example below:
The Checklist
Below is a general checklist for you to follow. It takes into consideration the few tips we've discussed in this post that should increase your post quality and thus your chances of improving both engagements and rewards:
- High quality screenshots (at least 3).
- Post structure: introduction, context, opinions, conclusion.
- Word count of at least 800 words.
- Engaging title.
Utilising these tips, you should quite easily reach at least a standard of 800 words in your posts. While we don't have a particular requirement, we do look for posts that have a stronger word count typically above 1000 words for curation consideration. Video entries in the community are naturally exempt from this, as we look more into the editing and speaking. Perhaps we'll have another post in the future for videos!
Remember, Hive is a social place in which we come for the creativity and personalities of others, so do not be afraid to display that personality! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us either on Discord or in our comments.
