The ultimate goal of any company on social media is to build brand awareness and reach new customers. The best way to achieve this is by consistently sharing relevant and valuable content. Apart from staying in touch with friends, the majority of people use social media for at least one of the following reasons:
- To stay up-to-date with news and current events
- To find funny or entertaining content
- To fill up spare time
Your content should be providing one of the above, otherwise it’s more likely to be seen as an unwelcome interruption on users feed.
An easy way to keep your content relevant to your brand and valuable to your audience is by creating content pillars.
What are Content Pillars?
Content pillars, also known as content buckets or content categories, are the key topics or themes that are most relevant to your brand. This content creation method involves generating and sharing content surrounding 3-5 key topics.
Sharing content this way allows you to really focus in on your niche and stay consistent in your messaging. It’s also significantly less time consuming and makes planning content a lot easier.
Let’s take a local café for example.
If the café is popular among readers, they could use ‘Book Reviews’ as one of their pillars. This helps them to really focus in on their niche and provide content that their customers will find valuable. ‘Behind the Scenes’ could be another pillar, where they show photos and videos of drinks and food being prepared, and the café itself.
The café could also use ‘Recipes’ as a content pillar and share quick recipes through photo or video on their website and socials. Finally, they could have a content pillar dedicated to the café itself, where they share news, updates, new products, staff posts and more.
Now the café has four content pillars ready to go; Book Reviews, Behind the Scenes, Recipes, and Café Focused.
Using these pillars they are providing their followers with valuable content that is consistent and relevant to their brand. This will help build trust in the brand and create stronger relationships with customers.
Other examples of businesses using pillars could be:
- A personal trainer focusing on workouts, nutrition, progress photos, and mental health
- A travel agents focusing on road trip itinerary’s, popular hikes around the world, and adventurous holiday destinations
- A dog groomer focusing on before and after shots, behind the scenes, local dog walking spots, tips/advice for grooming, and educational posts about dogs.
Each of these businesses are focusing on their niche and what type of content they know their customers would connect with.
Finding your Pillars
Now that you know what pillars are and how they work, its time to choose your own ones. Here are some tips for finding the right topics for you:
- Brainstorm topics that are relevant to your specific brand or industry
- Look at your social media insights – what type of posts are performing the best right now?
- Take note of what your audience is asking you and saying online. For example, if a significant number a clothing brands customers are looking for advice on how to style different pieces then ‘Styling’ would make a great pillar.
Listen to your customers and provide content you know they’ll find valuable.
Pro Tip: Create a word document or pull out a notepad and write out your 3-5 pillars. Dedicate time to sit down at least once a month and brainstorm as many content/post ideas as you can for each pillar. This will create a bank of content and make posting so much easier!
Once you’ve got your topics picked you can try out different content styles, you don’t have to just share a photo and caption for every post. You could use videos, blogs, infographics, live streams, polls, question boxes, and so much more.
