Social Media Content Pillars: What Are They & How To Use Them

When marketing your business, it is important you provide quality, engaging content to your audience to ensure recurring sales and stimulate new sales. One way you can ensure quality content is by employing the use of content pillars. These pillars are key themes around which your brand's social media content strategy is built, providing structure and guiding the creation of targeted, value-adding content that truly resonates with the audience. This guide explains what social media content pillars are, the different types you get, their benefits, and how you can pick your content pillars. 

What Are Social Media Content Pillars?

Social media content pillars are recurring key themes a brand wants to focus on and communicate to its audience through social media channels. These themes form the foundation of a social media strategy, ensuring consistency and coherence in messaging. These content pillars need to resonate with the brand's target audience for it to be successful. 

Usually, content pillars are three to five topics a brand consistently discusses, amplifies, and creates content for on social media. They help clarify your niche and establish a clear roadmap for the type of content to create and share. In other words, they help to structure and guide your content planning, ensuring that your social media efforts stay focused on areas that matter most and resonate best with your audience.

What Are The Most Common Types Of Social Media Content Pillars?

The most common types of social media content pillars are:

• Promotional content: They promote a brand's products or services, including special offers, product launches, and sales.
• Educational content: Provides valuable information to the audience through tutorials, webinars, and blog posts.
• Entertainment content: Provides your audience with fun and engaging content. It can be humorous posts, memes, GIFs, games, etc., often related to the brand or industry in some way.
• Conversational content: Helps start a conversation with the audience and build a community: polls, questions, or calls for user-generated content fall under this category.
• Product or Service Showcases: Highlighting the features and benefits of your products or services. This could involve tutorials, demos, or customer testimonials.

What Are Examples Of Social Media Content Pillars?

Let's take the most common types of social media content pillars and give examples of ways you can successfully utilize them:

• Educational Content: A skincare brand sharing blog posts about how different ingredients work on the skin or posting how-tos on applying their skincare products.
• Entertaining Content: A food brand sharing funny cooking fail videos or memes.
• Conversational Content: A clothing brand posting a poll on Instagram asking their followers to choose their favorite color for their next product launch.
• Promotional Content: A tech company sharing a post about a sale on their latest released product, with a link to their online sale.
• Product Showcases: A shoe brand showcasing their newest demo and how this shoe supports your feet. 

5 Benefits Of Using Social Media Content Pillars

Using social media content pillars in your digital marketing strategy can benefit you immensely. The benefits I find most useful include.

1. Improves Planning

By identifying content pillars, you can create a roadmap for the type of content you want to create and share, making it easier for you to plan and execute social media campaigns. It also ensures you stay organized and maintain a regular posting schedule, keeping your audience engaged and improving visibility on different social platforms. Also, using 1 of the 7 Zoho competitors can help improve post planning.

2. Enhances Branding

Branding is essential in business, and content pillars help define your brand's voice and personality on social media. When you consistently focus on the same topics, you reinforce what your brand stands for and what expertise it brings. Enhancing your branding helps distinguish your brand from your competitors, making it more memorable in the eyes of your target audience. 

3. Cover Topics In More Detail

When focusing on select key themes and topics, you can cover these areas in more depth. This could mean doing a carousel post or series of posts on a particular topic or even exploring different aspects of a topic over time. 

4. Keeps Your Page Topically Focused

In marketing, consistency is very important. By using content pillars, you ensure your social media pages remain focused and on-brand - helping attract and retain an audience that is genuinely interested in the topics you're posting. This ensures your audience remains engaged and will also increase your organic following faster. 

5. Boost Social Media Engagement

Social media users want content that gives value to their viewing experience. Content pillars help you generate posts that genuinely resonate with your target audience, leading to increased and retained engagement. When your content is consistent and relevant, followers will like, comment and share your content more - boosting overall social media performance and reach. 

Additionally, when your content has a high level of engagement, social media algorithms are more likely to boost your posts' visibility, allowing you to reach even more people!

How Can You Pick Your Businesses Content Pillars?

Whenever I start a new business and want to start marketing or help a new client pick their content pillars, I implement the following five steps:

1. Understand Your Audience: Firstly, you need to analyze and understand your audience - know who they are and what they want. Ask yourself questions like: What are the problems my audience is facing? What topics are they interested in? What are their pain points? 

Conduct surveys, look at comments on your social media posts, or use social media analytic tools to understand your audience's demographics and behavior.

2. Define Your Business Goals: Your content pillars should align with your brand's identity, mission, and values. Your brand's identity can help in the selection of your content pillars.
3. Analyze Successful Content and Create a List: Look at your past content that has performed well. This can provide insights into what types of content resonate with your audience. Then, create a list of high-list topics your audience is interested in.  For example, if you run a butchery, you can start creating content about questions and concerts your clients share the most - what is the nutritional value, what does organic meat mean, etc.
4. Brainstorm and Compare: After gathering all this information, brainstorm possible content topics. Then, see if you can group these topics into broader categories. These categories can serve as your potential content pillars. Ensure these content pillars align with your business goals and are relevant to your target audience. Then 3-5 content pillars you believe will have the most success when marketing on social media.
5. Test and Refine: You'll want to test your potential content pillars. Post content under each pillar and see how your audience responds. Over time, you can refine your pillars based on what works best.

What Tools Enhance Social Media Performance?

If you really want to enhance your social media performance, you need to use tools to help you. The most common social media tools include:

• Social media management tools: A social media management tool is arguably the most useful tool for enhancing your social media performance. These tools help streamline workflows, save time, and ensure content reaches the right audience at the right time. 

They offer features like content scheduling, analytics, and social media listening. Some popular social media management tools include Buffer and Sprout Social.

• Social media analytics tools: Knowledge is power, as is the case with these tools, providing insights into the performance of your social media campaigns. They track metrics such as engagement, reach, response rate, and conversion rates - allowing you to adjust future marketing campaigns based on the results obtained. Examples of social media analytics tools include Google Analytics and Eclincher.
• Content creation and design tools: Social media users love seeing visually appealing and engaging content on social media. This is why a content creation tool like Canva is so important, as it offers features like image editing, graphic design templates, and video editing. 
• Social media listening tools: Listening tools are a great way to identify trends, sentiment, and customer feedback. These tools allow businesses to monitor and analyze conversations and mentions of their brand on social media platforms. Examples of social media listening tools include Eclincher and HubSpot.

What Is The Biggest Benefit Of Using A Social Media Management Tool?

In my experience, the most significant benefit of using a social media management tool is the ability to streamline and automate various mundane tasks involved in managing social media accounts. Let me elaborate…

Tools like Eclincher allow you to schedule content, automate posts, track keywords, engagement, and competitor updates, and analyze your post performance - saving you time and effort that can be better spent on other aspects of your business.

Eclincher also provides a centralized dashboard for managing multiple social media accounts in one place. If you have accounts on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and other platforms, you can easily monitor and engage with your audience all from a single dashboard. 

What Are Common Challenges Content Creators Face When Implementing Social Media Content Pillars?

Challenges do come up when trying to implement social media content pillars. However, the more practice and experience you gain, the easier it gets. The most common challenges I usually face when implementing social media content pillars include the following:

• Maintaining Consistency: One of my biggest struggles is consistently creating and posting content that aligns with the chosen pillars. This requires planning, creativity, and a deep understanding of the brand and audience. 

Luckily, social media management tools can help you here; some tools let you recycle evergreen posts and even helps you by suggesting topics that will resonate well with your audience.

• Content Diversification: While content pillars provide a focus on a specific topic, there can be a challenge in maintaining variety within those pillars to keep the audience engaged and not appear repetitive. This is why you must focus on identifying and choosing content pillars that allow for a lot of subtopics, content formats, and angles. 
• Measuring Success: Determining the effectiveness of each content pillar can be challenging. It requires effective use of analytics to measure engagement and understand what content resonates with the audience. 

Again, a social media management tool can help you a lot here. For instance, Eclincher has some of the best analytical tools in the industry. Eclincher can analyze your posts and provide highly accurate results in an intuitive dashboard, making it easy for you to interpret and determine the success of the posts. 

• Resource Constraints: High-quality content creation often requires significant resources, including time, talent, and sometimes budget. This can be challenging, particularly for smaller businesses or solo content creators. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Can social media content pillars be used by both small businesses and large corporations?

Yes, content pillars can help guide a business's content strategy, regardless of the size of the business.

Is it essential to have a consistent posting schedule when using social media content pillars?

Yes, by maintaining a consistent posting schedule, you build a strong identity on social media. It also ensures regular engagement from your audience and keeps your brand in your audience's thoughts.  

The Bottom Line

Social media content pillars provide the foundation for a focused and effective social media strategy. When you align your content with your brand's mission, audience needs, and business objectives, you create meaningful engagement that enhances your online presence. Social media tools like Eclincher can help successfully implement your content pillars.