Looking to create content pillars for your social media strategy? We share the entire process with you as well as examples from popular brands.
Trying to create enough content gets draining. The stress only gets worse when you’re the only one running your business. If you’re drowning in content creation, the solution is in creating content pillars. They answer your questions of “What do I create next?”
A content pillar is meant to be a comprehensive long-form guide to a subject or theme, with many potential subtopics. This is why content pillars are also sometimes called content buckets or content hubs. Other names include flagship content or cornerstone content.
The subtopics briefly mentioned or linked within a content pillar offer a way to drive readers to even more of your content. These related pieces of content make up your topic cluster.
The content pillar itself should match your area of expertise, tone, and brand. This allows you to demonstrate your expertise and positions you as an authority on the subject.
There are three main types of content pillars, all with the intention to educate your audience: the How-To, the Guide, and the What-Is. We’ll explain a little more about each of these types below.
The same idea of a content pillar applies to each of these, meaning that they all broadly cover one topic and offer opportunities for further content that can be linked back to the main content pillar.
A high-quality How-To post will outline the steps to accomplish something while being easy to follow and understand. How-to content creates opportunities for many more pieces of content to expand on the individual steps of a task or process.
Great how-to posts and related content are easily shared and spread across social media platforms, especially if you tweak the content for each platform. For example, an Instagram version of the process might have a carousel outlining each of the steps, while a Twitter version might be a thread of steps with answers to audience questions. Your specific content style might also change depending on audience personas.
How-to content works well for those advertising a product or service because you can showcase that product or service throughout the content.
Anytime you’ve seen a piece of content titled, “The Ultimate Guide to X” you’ve found this content pillar. These long guides are made to briefly touch on all areas of a subject and provide links to further explanations of the details.
Guide content, when formatted well, can be evergreen, making it a key part of your social media strategy that you can return to time and time again. The same guide can essentially be shared in various ways with additional content referencing the main subject.
Writing What-is content offers your business the chance to shine the light on a topic you’re an expert in. This type of content pillar gives you the chance to explain what a topic means to your ideal audience using language that makes sense to them. So even if there are many What-Is articles on your core topic, you can still stand out from the crowd.
What-Is content pillar works best for complicated subjects that need in-depth understanding to fully grasp. For example, you might not be able to write an exceptional “What Is a Computer Mouse” content pillar, but you can definitely write a “What is Artificial Intelligence” content pillar because there is much you could teach about this subject.
Building a content pillar strategy for your social media takes less time than you might imagine. Once you know what your content pillars are, it’s easy to find new ways to frame subsequent topics and content ideas that all relate back to the original themes. Here’s how to find them:
What’s important for your audience to know about your business or brand? What do you want to be known for? Make a list of the major topics that your business is involved in for you to research.
Using the topics that you came up with, in the previous step, choose a topic your target audience needs to understand. Also, think about what your audience’s pain points are. What questions do you have the power to answer? One way to do this is to go on AnswerThePublic.com and search for a specific topic. This is also the best time to consider what your competitors are covering in their pillar content.
Once you’ve picked the overarching theme of your content pillar, decide which subtopics should be briefly covered so that you can expand on them in later content. You’ll need this list of subtopics for planning your social strategy and calendar. Keyword research also comes in at this stage as you’re planning your strategy.
Your content pillar posts are going to take the most amount of time to create since it needs to be a well-informed and comprehensive guide to the subject. Only after you’ve published your content pillar can you then begin creating all of the additional content pieces that relate back to the main content pillar. Plan when you’ll be publishing each subtopic of content ahead of time on your social content calendar to stay on track to reach your publishing goals.
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