Content Curator | Definition, Job Description, and Salary in 2024

We know there's a lot of searching for a content curator role as people diversify their content strategies.

Here at UpContent, we believe content curation is an integral part of a content marketing strategy that helps you deepen relationships and build trust with your audience. 

We have been serving hundreds of businesses with just that over the last five years.

Whether you're on the hunt for a content curation job or already serving as a content curator, there are a few things you need to know.  

• What does a content curator do? 
• What is a typical job description and salary? 
• What are the best ways to use curated content?  

The primary function of a content curator is to aid in surfacing the best content and conversations on a platform. 

This may be an internal learning or content management platform, a social media network, or the entire internet. 

The typical curator will have excellent content judgment, a strong command of social media, the ability to quickly organize thoughts and ideas around a specific theme, and a demonstrated understanding of breaking news, features, and how they inform social conversations.

According to Indeed, the average salary for a content curator is $66,489 in the United States, but this varies widely depending upon the content set requiring review, the complexity of the subject matter, and expected outcomes. 

Job duties would typically include something similar to the following: 

• Review and curate content from a wide variety of categories with a focus on the industry the company is in
• Identify online trends, personalities, and cultural conversations
• Capture and highlight the best content from a wide range of topics, including lifestyle topics relevant to the company
• Stay up-to-date on best practices and make recommendations for content strategy
• Identify and track metrics to measure the success of content curation efforts
• Manage content calendar and ensure timely publishing of content
• Edit and optimize content for search engine optimization
• Perform quality assurance checks on all content before publication

One of the most interesting things we've noticed amongst the hundreds of customers we have who are curating content from across the web is there isn’t a single one who has someone on the team with the title of Content Curator.

Instead, these companies have found success by allocating the responsibilities traditionally given to a curator across multiple people within your organization and leveraging technology to help coordinate these efforts.

Why has this been successful and eliminated the need for someone solely focused on curation efforts??

There are a few different reasons you would take this approach rather than hiring someone to manually scour the internet for enough third-party content.

1. Perspective

Content curation is about fleshing out your perspective on a particular topic or industry. 

But when it comes to curating content for your branded social media, email newsletters, or website, it's impossible for just one person alone to articulate the company's full perspective. 

After all, isn’t the company’s perspective the summation of the perspectives held by those within it?

Your team, and it shouldn't just be your marketing team, is actively approaching the demands, challenges, and successes your customers are facing both related to your services and beyond them. 

Evaluating relevant content through their eyes often brings to the forefront articles that a single person, or even a single team, would have otherwise dismissed.

This leads us to reason number two….

2. Expertise

Enabling those who already are subject matter experts around topics you want to curate can organically foster engagement between departments -helping each group achieve their departmental goals and creating better company alignment.

You already have intelligent people on your team. 

They are already reading about what’s occurring that impacts them and their customers. 

Tap into their expertise.

Chances are many of these people are part of the approval process anyway, so bringing them earlier into the curation process and allowing them to share their expertise across your distribution channels only serves to make all stages of the workflow easier - and the outcomes infinitely better.

3. Removing Bias

No matter how smart an individual is or knowledgeable they are, it's impossible to remove the inherent bias that person applies when determining which articles they want to curate.

And why does removing bias matter?

Because when you're trying to share the full perspective (see reason number one), no one individual can be entirely without bias. It's a part of our nature.

But when content curation is happening as a group collective, you're adding in all those perspectives to slowly filter out each individual's bias.

Let's reference the job description we listed earlier.

Thinking in terms of bias, anytime you see "judgment," "identify," or "determine," those are bias gateways.

So if you're not going to hire a content curator, or if you are one and want to learn more about a way to transform your role from being a ‘gatekeeper’ to ‘orchestrator’, how do you find, organize, evaluate, optimize, and distribute the best third-party content that adds context to your organization’s original perspective? 

The use of a content curation software may be worth evaluating. 

So we've looked at using your current team to curate content for your content marketing strategy, but if you aren't hiring someone to do 40 hours of content curation and distribution, how do you manage it all?

That's where content curation software can help automate the parts of content curation that can and should be automated and coordinate those that shouldn’t.

Here at UpContent, our proprietary crawler will refresh your custom Topics twice a day with content that fits the specifications you set.

You can be as broad or specific as you need, and then you can have those articles placed into Collections, the tool you'll use to automatically distribute those articles to your audience.

If you're interested in learning more about how UpContent can help you with your content curation goals, you can schedule a call with one of our Content Curation Experts today!

You can also learn more about how UpContent can help your content curation strategy by reading these articles!

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• Three Myths about UpContent: What UpContent Does and Doesn't Do
• How To Curate Content Faster- The UpContent Approach
• Five Things To Consider When Choosing a Content Curation Tool