The Importance of Content Pillars for a Social Media Strategy

Content pillars are the backbone of your social media strategy, helping keep your brand on track and true to voice. 

Besides organizing your plan, content pillars mobilize your social media goals and consistency. Stay tuned to understand content pillars better and identify these key terms for your brand. 

What Are Content Pillars? 

Also called content categories or clusters, content pillars lay the foundation of what content, conversations, and resources you share with your audience. 

How many content pillars should you have? Three to five is the sweet spot, allowing for content diversification but not too many topics to become overwhelming. These should also relate to the goals you want to achieve on social media. 

Content pillars aren’t chosen at random. They are the core of an SEO strategy, matching content topics to your target audiences’ search terms. With social media’s highly competitive landscape, brands should focus on these niche terms and interests to boost organic rankings and traffic. 

Why Are Content Pillars Important? 

Content pillars are a long-term social media strategy that helps authentically communicate your products and services. Having these topics in your back pocket makes content planning much easier. Here are a few more advantages of using content pillars:

• Control your brand narrative: Drive your brand voice by implementing your company values and vision into your content. This helps increase brand recognition and trust. 

• Branding consistency: Not only do content pillars streamline your brand voice, but give users an idea of what to expect from your social media pages. Plus, algorithms love consistency, helping boost your organic rankings. 

• Content organization: A steady stream of content topics on your calendar ensures you cover all your business bases and provide diversified content to your audience. 

• Increase authority in your space: Become a go-to expert in your niche by providing educational resources, pro tips, and entertainment. 

• Create relevant content: Your brand can provide valuable content based on your audience’s needs and desires, becoming a relevant source for your audience. 

Content Pillar Examples

To better understand content pillars, let’s look at a few possible examples: 

• A monthly clothing subscription company may create content about fashion inspiration, clothing trends, and subscription benefits. 
• An indoor cycling studio may have content pillars such as cycling education, health and wellness tips, and the benefits of cycling. 
• A dentist’s office could have content pillars like dental education, how-to’s and tutorials for healthy teeth, and dentist humor. 

While these are fictional examples, these broad topics define content ideas to align with a brand’s overall strategy. 

How to Identify Content Pillars for Your Brand

Brands must complete five phases to select and implement content pillars, which include the following: 

• Goals and audience needs
• Audience and keyword research
• Content performance analysis 
• Planning and scheduling

Goals and audience needs 

We know that social media marketing is an effort for your overall business goals. Therefore, diving into topics, your brand needs to define your social media goals and where your audience fits into this. 

Not only should you define your overall marketing goals, but ask: 

• How do you want your audience to feel when consuming your content? 
• What content could provide value to your audience? 
• What action(s) do you want your audience to take on social media? 

We recommend defining your social media KPIs quarterly to continue measuring and improving your impacts. 

Audience and keyword research

The next phase is conducting some research about your audience, and the search terms they use. Gain content ideas and better audience what your audience is looking for. Keep in mind that keywords and demographics may differ per platform. 

To find your key social media demographics there are two ways to do this: jumping between each social media platform or viewing all your channel demographics in one place, with Metricool. While each network has its native demographic tools, Metricool organizes social media analytics in one place. This eliminates unnecessary time switching between networks and searching for each insights section. 

Metricool makes it easy by breaking down each channel’s analytics in one dashboard. For example, on one page view your Instagram content analytics, profile growth, hashtags, competitors, and demographics: 

Source: Metricool Analytics

How can you find keywords? There are a few free tools you can use to view trends, patterns, and search volumes: 

• Google Trends: Understand what people search for on Google, grasping a large-scope view of trending topics and search terms. Narrow your results by category, region, language, and period to nail down relevant answers. 

• Answer the Public: Analyze search terms for Google, Bing, YouTube, TikTok, and Amazon to see common pain points and questions. 

• Pinterest Trends: View the top monthly, yearly, seasonal, and growing search terms on Pinterest. Filter by date, interests, keywords, age, and gender for narrowed results. 

• TikTok Creative Center: With this tool, view the top hashtags, songs, creators, and TikTok videos on the platform. While this helps you find relevant keywords, gain inspiration from top-performing content.  

• Instagram Search: This is a simple way to view top keywords and content by term. Take note of the content and brands positioned in the first positions. 

For more information about keyword research, make sure to follow this guide: 

Content performance analysis 

The next step is analyzing your content results. This step is crucial to understanding the topics, keywords, and formats that have performed best for your brand. 

How can you analyze your content performance? There are two ways to do this: jumping between each platform’s insights sections or analyzing social media metrics in one space with Metricool. Switching between multiple platforms can become tedious and timely. Therefore, save time and energy with a social media analytics tool. 

Metricool’s Brand Summary page shows your social media success, showing each channel’s followers, impressions, interactions, and number of posts in the period. View top-performing posts to see which channels and content achieved the highest impressions and interactions. 

Source: Metricool Brand Summary

Alternatively, analyze each channel in detail with one click. Select the network to examine community growth, demographic information, profile impressions and clicks, and content performance. View your most successful posts per channel to see what content resonates best with your audience. This is key for determining content pillars. 

Curious about which hashtags perform best for your Instagram and TikTok pages? We have you covered. See which hashtags bring you the most impressions, likes, and comments to consider these keywords for your strategy. 

Analyze your industry competitors on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and Twitch to benchmark your content against similar brands. After gathering your tangible content performance metrics, identify successful content patterns and topics to determine your brand’s ideal pillars. 

Define content pillars with sub-topics 

Now that you have identified your top-performing content, determine each content “cluster” and break it down into sub-topics. Each cluster should be broad, while the sub-topics can go into more detail. 

While this helps your brand brainstorm diverse content ideas, it also further defines your specific narrative. This is also known as a content matrix, allowing you to generate a multitude of ideas across each channel. We recommend using this social media planning template to organize your strategy: 

Planning and scheduling 

The final phase is to execute your content pillars by planning and scheduling your content. As mentioned above, content pillars keep your strategy on track. Without organizing your content per pillar, you risk sharing repetitive and disadvantageous content. 

Using a social media content calendar is ideal for this step. Did you know that with Metricool you can organize and schedule content for free? Not only can you post for free, but you can schedule content for multiple platforms at once. Planning ahead is a social media manager’s dream, and with Metricool, it’s a reality. 

For Google Drive and Canva lovers, connect to your accounts directly from Metricool’s planner to unify tools. 

Source: Metricool Planner

Executing a Content Strategy with Metricool 

Metricool is the Swiss army knife of social media, providing diverse features and information for brands to plan and execute their social media strategy in one place. Analytics are at the core of a strategy, which is why Metricool provides the most crucial metrics to enhance a strategy. 

Metricool users can also schedule up to 50 posts a month for free, across 9+ social media platforms. The planner includes a variety of strategic features – best times, URL generator, AI assistant, feed previews, and hashtag generator – to optimize and track campaign performance. 

Create your free account to utilize this comprehensive tool for a more organized and advanced social strategy. 

Anniston Ward , 25 October 2024