Content Pillars for Social Media: The Ultimate Guide to Creating and Using Them Effectively * Anna Bruno

Content pillars for social media are broad themes or topics that serve as a guide for creating content for your company’s social profiles. They keep your content production focused, ensure consistency, and help you build authority around relevant topics. These pillars are the foundation on which to build your online presence, providing a solid structure for consistent and effective communication.

Summary

What are content pillars for social media

IContent pillars for social media are key, broad topics that guide your company’s content creation efforts for your social profiles. They act as the foundation of your content strategy, keeping production focused, ensuring consistency, and helping you develop authority around subjects relevant to your target audience.

It’s recommended to select three to five content pillars. Any content you produce should fit into at least one of these pillars. For example, if you own a home decor brand, your content pillars could be:

Inspiring interiors
Style tips
Color theory
Company news

You can publish content related to one or more of these subjects every day. If you keep doing this consistently, interior design enthusiasts will start to see your brand as an authority on these topics and as a reliable source of help and inspiration.

Why content pillars are important for your social strategy

Content pillars for social media are helpful because they allow you to:

Establish brand identity

Using a set of content pillars helps people associate your brand with those specific themes. That’s why choosing the right pillars is important. They should be subjects that:

Interest your target customers
Help your customers achieve their goals
Align with your brand’s mission and values

For example, consider a brand that sells gardening equipment. Its target audience includes both beginner and experienced gardeners who want to have a beautiful garden, learn new gardening techniques, and have fun.

The brand’s mission is to help gardening enthusiasts at all levels improve their skills. Its values are to be helpful, encouraging, inspiring, and inclusive.

This gardening brand could choose the following content pillars:

Garden inspiration: videos, images, and user-generated content showcasing inspirational gardens
Gardening for everyone: posts that highlight gardeners from different backgrounds and communities
Gardening tips: videos, infographics, and lists with expert advice on growing and gardening

Over time, the brand will be able to cultivate an identity that reflects its personality and what it cares about.

Diversifying your content offerings

Content pillars give you a range of ideas to post about, keeping things interesting and allowing you to target multiple audiences. For example, a running shoe brand wouldn’t want to post only about running shoes. Instead, they might have a pillar on running tips, one on community stories, and one for sharing updates about national and local running events. This way, the content is diversified so there’s something for all the brand’s followers.

Ensuring consistency

Sticking to a handful of content pillars saves you from constantly having to come up with new ideas. This consistency can build trust with your audience. And the more reliable a brand appears, the more likely people are to buy from it. For example, suppose a brand that used to post on social media every day suddenly stops posting for a while. A potential customer might think the company no longer cares about its followers and be hesitant to buy from it.

The difference between content pillars and content buckets

Some people use the terms “content pillar” and “content bucket” interchangeably. But they’re not exactly the same thing. Content pillars are the broad topics around which your brand creates content. Content buckets, on the other hand, are the broad categories or types you can use to organize your content and plan your social calendar. This means you can cover almost all your pillars with each type of bucket. Let’s look at four of the most common content buckets to better illustrate the concept:

The educational content bucket

An educational content bucket helps your audience gain the knowledge they need to reach their goals and establishes your business as an authority. Educational content is a key part of Wells Fargo’s social presence. And they’re able to cover multiple topics through this bucket. They regularly post about topics like staying safe from scams and fraud, and how to set financial goals.

The inspirational content bucket

Inspirational content reminds people of what they want to achieve and helps associate your brand with progress toward those goals. Tombow posts a lot of inspirational content to show its audience the amazing artwork they can create. This inspires the brand’s audience, making them want to come back again and again to see what else they can accomplish.

Wix is another good example. The brand regularly shares inspirational posts showcasing client websites built with its website builder tool. Showing what can be accomplished with the Wix platform taps into people’s aspirations to have professional-looking websites.

The entertainment content bucket

Creating humorous or otherwise entertaining content can help your brand generate more engagement and be more memorable. A 2022 Oracle report found that 91% of people prefer fun brands and 72% would choose a brand that uses humor over the competition. Social media is the perfect place for brands to explore this side, since people are usually on social to be entertained.

The Cheesecake Factory has made entertainment a part of their brand. They regularly post fun or playful content across all their social platforms. The key, however, is to remember your content pillars. Because posts meant to engage users through humor can fall flat if they’re not relevant to your brand.

The promotional content bucket

Having a dedicated bucket for promotional content can help you showcase your offerings without paid ads and increase conversions. You wouldn’t want all your content to be promotional, because people also want to be entertained and inspired on social media.

But regularly sharing posts about the benefits of your products or services, promoting sales, etc. is a good way to keep customers informed and encourage them to buy from you.

Look at Target: it includes lots of promotional content across its social channels, and those posts keep followers informed. Even with promotional content, you can cover a variety of pillars. For example, the running shoe brand mentioned above could post about an upcoming race and mention there’s still time to break in a pair of its new releases before the event. Or highlight a community story featuring someone visiting their store.

How to create and use content pillars for social media

Let’s look at the nine steps necessary to create and implement content pillars.

1. Define your brand’s mission and values

Having a clear understanding of your mission and values gives you a starting point for choosing your pillars and ensures they’re aligned with your overall business goals. To define your mission, consider the following questions:

Why does your brand exist?
What does your brand stand for?
What sets your brand apart from its competitors?
What do you want to achieve with your brand (aside from selling)?
How will your brand achieve those goals?

Write down the answers to the questions above. Then combine them into a single sentence that represents your mission statement. For example, IKEA’s mission statement is:

“To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible can afford them“.

Next, define your brand’s values by answering the following questions:

What are the non-negotiable aspects of your brand (e.g., low prices, high quality, great customer service)?
How do you want people to perceive your brand?
If your brand were a person, how would you describe it?

Based on your answers, choose five values you think define your brand. Here are a few examples:

Authenticity
Passion
Innovation
Reliability
Social responsibility

2. Identify your target audience

Identifying your target audience and understanding their mindset allows you to choose the most relevant content pillars for them, increasing your chances of reaching them. Start by asking yourself what problem your product or service solves and who benefits from it the most. Suppose your company sells premium ground coffee by subscription to keep costs low for customers. The problem you solve is the lack of access to quality coffee, and the people who benefit most are busy professionals who don’t have time to stop at a coffee shop.

Then, gather some supporting data using tools like One2Target. Just enter a few competitors to get a holistic view of your market audience. You’ll see demographic information, socioeconomic status, interests, and even social media preferences.

The next step is to create one or more buyer personas with all this information. These are profiles that represent the ideal buyer or ideal buyers for your product or service. Now that you have clearly defined your brand and your audience, you can start formulating some pillars. In this case, you could have one about tips for low-cost coffee and one about morning routines.

3. Conduct keyword research

Knowing your brand’s mission and values, as well as who your target audience is, is incredibly helpful for determining your content pillars. But it’s still a good idea to do keyword research. That’s because the topics your audience searches for on Google are likely also of interest on social media. You can easily perform keyword research using Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool.

Enter a broad term related to your brand and click “Search.” You’ll likely see a long list of related terms. To narrow it down to more specific ideas, use the suggested groups on the left.

As you can see, there are many keywords related to how much caffeine coffee contains. Most of them get thousands of searches each month. This might inspire you to have a pillar focused on caffeinated coffee information (facts, comparisons, etc.).

4. Create a clear structure for your content pillar plan

You should now have a list of pillar ideas. Which you can use to create a structured plan that will guide all your social content. First of all, write down the names of your content pillars.

Then, write a short description of the types of content you will create for each pillar. For example: videos, GIFs, infographics, photos, and written posts. And consider jotting down some more specific ideas under each pillar.

5. Create and publish quality content

The quality of your content is as important as the quality of your plan. High-quality social content attracts attention, drives engagement, and may even lead to business results. Follow these guidelines to ensure your content is top-notch:

Stick to your brand’s colors, fonts, and tone of voice
Do thorough research for informative posts
Write clear, concise, and easy-to-read copy
Use the best available photo and video equipment
Make sure every post provides value in some way
Then, schedule your posts in advance to maintain consistency

With Semrush Social Poster, you can quickly and easily schedule your social posts across multiple platforms.

6. Repurpose content across different platforms

Repurposing your content across different platforms helps maximize reach and engagement without duplicating efforts. For example, if you’ve created a carousel post for LinkedIn, you can use the same images to create an Instagram Reel. Or, you can use the text from an infographic posted on Pinterest to create a text post on X (formerly Twitter). Not sure which channels to focus on? Go back and review your audience’s social media preferences in One2Target.

7. Measure results and make adjustments

Measuring the performance of your content allows you to see which pillars are working well. This way, you can create even more effective content in the future. So how can you track results?

Semrush Social Analytics tracks key metrics such as reactions, shares, and clicks. It presents the data for you, so you can easily see what’s working well and where you might improve. And track your competitors’ social media performance using Social Tracker, to see what’s working well for them and how you compare. Use all this information to determine if you need to make adjustments to your pillars. For example, you might find that one or two pillars are performing particularly well and decide to publish more of that type of content. Or, you might discover that a competitor is covering a pillar you haven’t included and is generating great engagement. This might prompt you to replace one of your lower-performing pillars.