So since I came back to Hive I have been browsing through some of the communities looking to curate content. My following feed isn't what it used to be, and I need some new people to follow. I've been spending time in the OCD community the last couple of days and I have some observations that I thought I would share with anyone who wants to improve their content in the hopes of a curator visiting their post.
Let's start with why I feel like I have any right to tell people how to post.
Back in the day, circa 2018, I was a Curator for @curie. I spent several months qualifying weekly as one of the top curators for Curie, until I got a promotion at work and didn't have time to curate any more. I've seen thousands of posts, and feel like I have a good sense of what is and is not eligible to be curated.
Now, @Curie is not @OCD nor is it @Curangel or @Gems or any of the other big curation groups out there these days, so my particular judgments may not apply to the curators in these groups. Hell, they may night even qualify for Curie anymore. But they do qualify for my vote, and are just some good guidelines to make your posts more appealing.
I will post these as they hit me during my curation efforts. Tonight's edition comes from one specific post I ran in to a couple nights ago. I did see many posts like this, but this one struck me particularly because it was a subject matter that appealed to me. I'm not going to call out the specific post, or poster, you can search for it if you are so inclined. The post in question was titled as a review of Hayley Williams.
Hayley Williams is the lead singer of Paramore, a band based right here in Nashville. They also happen to be a favorite band of mine, so I opened the post with a lot of interest in seeing what the author had to say. What I got instead, looked like it could have come off of Wikipedia. It was a list of facts. It was clear that the author's first language was not English, which isn't a problem, but the delivery of straight facts made the post feel unoriginal.
To improve upon this content, the writer could have shared, instead of just a random list of songs that Hayley had sung, some of their favorite songs through the years. They could have talked about how Hayley recently released her first solo album and the first single, "Simmer" was a hit on the Alternative Charts. (And a really damn good song too.)
So the advice here is to have an opinion and share it. Answer some of the following questions:
What do you like about the object of the post?
What do you dislike about the object of the post?
How were you introduced to the object of the post?
How does the object of the post make you feel?
Why should the reader agree or disagree with your view of the object?
Instead of the post just being a list of facts that can be found anywhere, bring it back to you. Make it personal. People are drawn to a personal experience. They, mostly, are not going to be drawn to 1000 words of dry factual data.
So that's the word of wisdom for the night. Have an opinion, give a viewpoint. This take on your posts will give readers buy in. Whether they agree with your views or not, can be the start of a conversation in the comments. This will help you get engagement on your post, and repeat readers. And if you are lucky, it might even draw in one of those elusive curators out there looking for great content to upvote.
Here's the thing about Curation. Curators WANT the posts they open to shine. They deeply desire for every post to be simply amazing so they can recommend it to be hit with a big vote. If the first five posts they open in a day are all worthy of curation, then they don't have to spend time going through a hundred more posts looking for great content to vote on. Take the time to make your content personal, make it stand out, and the curators will find you eventually.
More to come!