Social Media Strategy Basics: Content Pillars 101

It’s Sunday night and you realize you have no posts planned for your social media for the week ahead. You start scrambling for ideas and pick something randomly that happened over the weekend and create some content. It’s good enough, you guess.

Monday morning comes and you post it to get a decent amount of engagement but no profile traffic and zero website taps. You repeat this cycle to similar results for weeks or months, or worse… years.

This is a common trap that a lot of entrepreneurs and creators fall into. Posting without structure is planning to fail when it comes to content creation and social media. And yet, there is a simple solution that many coaches and experts are teaching incorrectly and incompletely.

Content Pillars: The Structure of Your Social Media Strategy

If your social media strategy is a house, your business goals are the foundation and your content pillars are the beams that support everything else.

Content pillars give your content ideas structure and clarity by providing categories or topics that are aligned with your overarching goals and values and can be broken down into subtopics. And you can (and should) return to your content pillars consistently, so you don’t have to guess what to post anymore.

A Common Mistake: Content Pillars ≠ Content Intentions

I’ve seen this mistake more times than I can count. A client will submit their form to work with me. Under “Do you already have content pillars?” they check “yes”. In response to the next question, “If you answered yes, please list your content pillars below,” I read the same four words: educate, inspire, entertain, promote.

These are content intentions, not content pillars. Each of these intentions can be paired with a content pillar or content topic. For example, I can post about social media engagement as a reel where I’m lipsyncing to a funny soundbite. That would pair my content pillar subtopic (engagement) with an intention (to entertain).

My 3-step content pillar Framework

Different coaches and social media strategists will create content pillars differently. I’ve formulated this method over the last nine years managing 40 accounts in 20 different industries and have proven it with over 350 coaching and strategy clients. It is unique to the work I do with clients and has helped my clients generate $50,000-revenue months (and more).

STEP ONE: Identify 4-6 core topics. Your core topics are overarching areas of expertise, experience, passion, and purpose. These should be directly related to how you work with clients or customers and should reflect the ways you support them through their transformation. Below are some examples of content pillars:

For a health coach:

1. Food science

2. Healthy recipes

3. Mindset

4. Exercise

5. Personal philosophy

6. Social proof

For an art teacher:

1. Color theory

2. Products and tools

3. Techniques

4. Art history

5. The business of art

6. Personal philosophy

For a fashion & beauty creator:

1. Style & fashion

2. Lifestyle

3. Beauty tips & products

4. Self-expression

5. Personal philosophy

STEP TWO: Break each topic down into several sub-topics. This stage helps you get into the specifics or the nuance of each content pillar.

Eg. If my content pillar is “Food Science”, I can break that down into vitamins and minerals, macros, dietary restrictions, food sensitivities, hormones, etc.

NOTE: If you can’t break down a content pillar into subtopics, it’s probably not a content pillar (and is likely actually a subtopic). See if you can fit it under one of your larger content pillars, or go high-level and see if you can conceptualize the pillar you’re missing entirely.

STEP THREE: You need to go one step further (this is the step most people never make it to). Your content pillars should also align with your goals, including:

1. How you serve your clients: If you’re always talking about how personal and unique your work is, but you only offer a generic, one-size-fits-all product as a solution, your content won’t align with how you serve your clients. Keep your content aligned with the service or product you offer to reduce client confusion.
   

2. What you want to attract more of: You have a consulting business and you really want to attract people for your group program, but you’re constantly posting about your private clients. Change the way you frame your content so that it references more of the transformation that happens in community.
   

3. Philosophies that inform your work and values: Your personal experience, education, and values are THE distinguishing factor between you and the sea of people selling essentially the exact same thing. The more you can infuse your lived experience, specialized education (both directly and indirectly related to your work), and personal values into your work, the more uniquely aligned your content will be on a core level.

Some final words on content

Each piece of content you create should only include one content pillar subtopic and one content goal or intention. And similarly, when you measure your post results, you should look specifically at the metric that best represents your goal.

Lastly, different content formats (reels, IG story, carousels, memes, etc.) lend themselves more naturally to certain goals and intentions. Match topics and formats wisely and remember that if it feels like a reach to you, it’ll most certainly feel like a reach for your audience.

If you’re looking for support with content pillars or your overall social media strategy, book a strategy session and audit with me.

Why Your Hashtags Don't Actually Get You More Reach

Adding hashtags won’t result in more views or increase content distribution, according to the Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, during his weekly Ask Me Anything session on March 18th, 2022.

And for final context, this is Adam’s story I referenced here: pic.twitter.com/4S36PsINYd

— allie | social media whisperer (she/her) (@thatalliemason) March 21, 2022

If you’ve been using Instagram professionally over the last few years, you’ve probably heard a lot of different best practices for using hashtag, with experts (and research) over the years suggesting the ”optimal” number of hashtags to use per post was 1-3, 7-15, 20 all the way up to 30 (the maximum you can use on a post).

But in September 2021, a few months after Instagram announced their partnership with Google to index and make Instagram posts searchable on Google, they changed their tune publicly. This time they emphasized relevancy over quantity and encouraged users to stick to 3-5 per post.

And while the internet seems to collectively lose their marbles every time Mosseri and the Instagram team make an announcement about hashtags, here’s why this one is true and what it means for your business.

how to think about hashtags

Hashtags are a tool Instagram uses to categorize your content, but the only way the hashtags will result in more reach or views is if the people engaging with the content signal that it’s high-value.

So, instead of trying to use hashtags like they’re some new hack to get you more views and followers, Instagram’s Creators account suggests you should think about them “as a tool that provides context about your post and supports delivering content to people who are interesting in a particular topic.”

So, the first thing you need to understand is…

How instagram’s algorithm decides which content to suggest to users.

There are 5 signals that Instagram uses to determine if a piece of content is high-value: likes, comments, saves, tapping through to your profile — and most importantly — time spent.

The algorithm then cross-references the information about the post with information about the person who posted, your activity, and your history of interacting with someone to determine how interested you might be in that piece of content.

If your content is sending the right signals to Instagram via engagement and time spent, your content will be suggested to more people through four main traffic sources: explore, top posts on hashtag pages, hashtags people follow, and suggested posts in the home feed.

If your content meets these criteria, it can result in more reach from hashtags. And more specifically, when your post starts performing well in hashtag categories like recent posts or followed hashtags, the algorithm will suggest it to more people and boost it to top posts.

But your content didn’t get improved reach because of the hashtag you used. This is a correlation but not causation. What caused the post to do well in hashtags was the content itself. Including hashtags improved the performance by giving your content more opportunities to be suggested to users via the different recommendation options on the app.

So what should you focus on to improve your Instagram reach?

Spend less time trying to “hack hashtags” and more time creating the best possible content for your followers. Your followers’ responses are the first signals that determine how to distribute your post across the home feed, explore page, suggested posts & hashtags.

Do market research to find out what your audience needs and wants. You can try Answer The Public, reading industry blogs or magazines, or simply ask your existing audience using a question or poll sticker on your Instagram story.

Improve your design chops. When creating graphics, make sure your design is easy to read and doesn’t include too much information. And even though it might be tempting to ask people to like, comment, share, save and tap the link in your bio, you’re more likely to have your audience take action when you only ask them to do one thing at a time.

Invest in your customer experience. If you’re using Instagram to sell a product or service, remember the most important element of your business strategy is creating the best possible product or service for your clients or customers. Implement systems and strategies to give your customers the best possible experience first, then focus on the minutia of optimizing your hashtags.

Remember: word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool businesses have available to them, and it’s free.

“Beyond friends and family, 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts. And 74% of consumers identify word of mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions.” - BigCommerce

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Sources:

https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/shedding-more-light-on-how-instagram-works

https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/word-of-mouth-marketing/#word-of-mouth-marketing-statistics

https://later.com/blog/how-many-hashtags-on-instagram/