HOW DO I BECOME A CURATOR?
"Curator." Just listen to how impressive that sounds. It takes a vast amount of experience to become a curator at a top art museum. It takes about 10 minutes to become a content curator, but patience and dedication to become a great one.
Actually, content curation can hold various meanings at different companies, so let's be clear and define the term broadly.
Popularisation of the term "Content Curation" is attributed to Rohit Bhargava, in his Content Curation Manifesto. He summed up the goals of this new sector by specifying:
'To satisfy the people's hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individuals working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators."
Content curation is a lot like making a fruit salad. You gather up different types of fruit (content) that seems appealing, and cut it up into interesting shapes, creating something that has never been tasted before. The original pieces were good on their own, but combined, they take things to a whole new level. Add a dash of editorial spice or controversial lemon juice, and you totally change the finished flavour.
There are many different ways to go about content curation, but they all boil down to offering followers an informative and entertaining way to engage with your brand.
Just as retailers arrange items in the store to lead customers along an ideal purchase path, curation positions marketing messages that move readers along the marketing funnel from awareness to advocacy. With the right content selection and arrangement, curated sites encourage their visitors to delve deeper and grow from followers into fans. Content curation can turn a scattered collection of information bits into a seamless product story that organically builds sales interest.
Discovering the right content to curate can have tremendous implications. Simply posting to a corporate blog once a week and keeping up with Facebook is not enough, especially when everyone is doing it. Instead, businesses need to be conscious of all of the different content that is posted, and how it can be displayed to encourage click-throughs.
Another factor in content curation is the simple truth that many businesses lack the resources to produce all of their content internally. Sometimes, posting links to articles and videos that have already covered a topic creates the same effect but without the often hefty price tag of internal production.
Curation allows businesses to draw on many disparate sources to tell their story and promote their brand. The trick, of course, is knowing what, when and how to share it with your followers.