Whether you are managing your own social media or you hire a professional, determining your content pillars is an important step in the content planning process.

Content pillars are 3-5 topics or themes for your social media. Each of these topics should relate directly to the goal for your business.

Determining your content pillars will:

• Help you to target your content to your audience and your business goal.
• Help you to ideate new content when you find yourself at a loss for what to post… because it will happen.
• Make planning content easier. Rather than scrambling to create last-minute posts, you can use your content pillars to strategically build your content calendar for the month ahead.

Let’s look at some examples:

• A coffee shop’s pillars could be: coffee, ethical sourcing, local musicians.
• A style blogger:  fashion, body positivity, beauty, and self care
• A realtor: homes for sale, community, family

You might notice that, in each case, there is a primary content pillar– the one that is obvious– and 2-3 ancillary or supporting themes. This allows for a variety of types of posts, which add interest, but all tie back to the primary objective.

A real life example of this is The Back Room, an online author event.  The primary content pillar is obviously books and reading. But the ancillary themes are cocktails–their tagline is “cocktails and conversation– and the jazz age, because “the back room” evokes the private, intimate vibe of a speakeasy).

In the image above, you notice that each pillar is represented but none of them are scheduled back-to-back. Mixing it up like this isn’t just for the feed; it also keeps your audience engaged and not too quickly bored with one type of content repeated over and over.

Using a social media scheduling tool like Later or Planoply allows you to easily schedule your content beforehand and to visually plan your posts in order to keep the balance right.

Thinking in terms of content pillars isn’t about creating limiting rules.  It’s about building a framework which allows you to be creative within each pillar area. It also helps you to keep your social media on message, organized, and fresh for your followers!