How To Create Content Pillars for Social Media

Content Pillars are a group of 3-5 key themes that your content is consistently focused around. They are essential to streamlining your content while ensuring that it remains relevant, purposeful, and aligned with your overarching business goals. Additionally, content pillars help your audience to navigate through your content as they can understand the type of content you create and whether it is relevant to them. If you want to know how to create content pillars that position yourself as an expert in your niche, keep reading.

The 5 Content Pillars

Ever wondered where to start when creating your content pillars?  Understanding the foundational building blocks for your content pillars is essential to making them effective. Below are 5 key aspects to consider when creating your content pillars.

1. Educational – In order to be positioned as an expert, adding value to your audience is key. What knowledge do you have that you desire to share with your audience that will build them further?
2. Promotional – As well as educating your audience, what products or services are you increasing awareness around because you know the value they provide?
3. Inspirational – How does your content create transformation or motivate your audience? A tribe that you inspire is one that will continue to return.
4. Community – People are drawn to a sense of belonging, so fostering a sense of community through your content is extremely powerful!
5. Engagement – How are you going to be intentional about communicating with your audience in order to nurture them and build strong relationships?

Choosing your content pillars

When choosing your content pillars here are a few things to consider:

1. Your audience – Your content is designed for your audience, so in order to create the right content for them it’s important to understand their desires, needs, and who they are overall. This will also enable you to target them effectively.
2. What are your key concepts and values? – What are some of the concerns and issues that you seek to tackle among your audience and how can this be translated through your content? From here you can do some keyword research to help to ignite your content ideas.
3. Your Brand Pillars – Your content pillars are birthed from these what message does your brand articulate to your audience and how do you seek to position it? What are your goals, missions tones, and identity? Allow your pillars to directly reflect this.

But do you know how many content pillars for social media you actually need? Find out in this post.

How to create content pillars for social media

When thinking about your content pillars it’s important that you keep your audience at the core of your focus. Understand the audience that you currently have and work towards figuring out how you can best serve them as well as what problems they are currently facing.   Once you’ve started to do that, follow these steps to begin forming your content pillars:

1. Audit your social media to see what content is currently working and what isn’t
2. Identify the keywords that your audience cares about
3. Create a spreadsheet of your collated research of topics and keywords.
4. Sort your research into buckets based on similarities to form your core content pillars
5. From these buckets form 3-5 content pillars that are broad enough to allow your ideas to flow but not too broad that your content’s purpose is lost.

To learn how to create content that connects with your target audience, you can read more about it here.

Content pillar examples

On my Instagram and Twitter, I have content pillars as well so that I can better connect with my audience and attract potential clients. My content pillars are:

• Tech
• Business and branding
• Productivity
• Personal story
• Content

These pillars enable me to cover a wealth of topics but also fall in line with my business goals and direction. Most importantly, they also relate to my audience’s needs.

Check out this YouTube video for more!

Your content pillars are what optimize your strategy. Impactful content is content that serves a purpose and pillars are the foundational pieces to that. If you are ready to leverage your content strategy and create content that is in alignment with your business direction, be sure to get in touch with me today or subscribe to my newsletter to learn more.