Social media content pillars describe the types of content you share across your channels to nurture your audience. Specifically, it refers to how you choose to nurture it, whether that’s educating, inspiring or otherwise.
However, like the words bear, jam and spring in the English language, which carry dual meanings, content pillars also take on different definitions when we’re talking SEO. In terms of your blogs, content pillars are the three to five foundational themes or topics you write about, with content clusters that branch out to explore different aspects of those themes.
The two are often confused. This blog will first define and explain both types of content pillars, then explore how to operationalize both in your social strategy with the help of AI.
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Content Pillars for Social Media
Social media content pillars describe the delivery style of your social media content. Some content is out there to inspire. Others are put forth to educate. For some brands, it’s just about building community. Most have a mix, adding dimension and nuance to content. Here are the seven examples of content pillars for socials:
- Educational: Expanding your audience’s knowledge and skills, while building authority through your expertise. This includes how-to guides, tips and tutorials, facts or industry insights.
- Entertainment: Giving your audience a giggle from relatable memes, funny videos, quizzes and challenges. The goal is to drive engagement and enjoyment.
- Inspirational: Building emotional connection through success stories, motivational or aspirational content.
- Promotional: Driving conversions through direct sales posts, product demos, offers and calls-to-action.
- Community: Engaging your community to nurture a two-way relationship through polls, votes, user-generated content (UGC), testimonials, reviews and competitions.
- Behind-the-scenes: Inviting your audience to connect with the authenticity and humanity underpinning your brand via team introductions, Q&A, bloopers and storytelling.
- Brand-focused: Highlighting your mission, values, brand story and company culture.
Pillars provide a strategic framework that ensures your content is relevant, focused and consistent: Your audience knows what to expect from your brand, and your brand knows how to show up for your audience. That’s what builds trust and loyalty.
Content Pillars for SEO
SEO content pillars (also known as content buckets) are the subject matter you address in your blogs and social media content. For instance, a vegetarian restaurant might choose healthy nutrition, vegetarian dishes from around the world and knife skills as its pillars. That brand would build topical authority by addressing these themes across a range of articles and posts, building a niche following in those areas.
But you can’t be everything to everyone. This is where you must find the sweet spot between:
- Your expertise: What do you actually know?
- Audience pain points: What do they keep asking you?
- Business goals: What do you sell?
If you’re already creating content, take a look at the topics you already address. If you only have one, explore which themes your competitors are (or aren’t) covering and what your audience asks about most, then add a few more pillars based on what you find. If your pillars feel scattered or unclear, check which concepts get the most engagement and narrow them down to between three and five core areas.
Content Clusters
Content clusters are the sub-topics that branch off your core topic. You can use these in your social media and blog content pillars. For instance, in the vegetarian restaurant’s healthy nutrition pillar, they might address fermented foods, how to balance your macros as a vegetarian, simple and healthy veg meals for kids and so much more.
This helps you build topical authority in specific areas, fills up your content calendar (you could cluster 20 posts around the fermented foods pillar) and supports retention, as audiences follow you for a specific topic.
To summarise, your SEO pillars determine the areas of expertise you’ll share with your audience. Your topic clusters are the sub-topics you talk about, stemming from your SEO pillars. Your social content pillars determine how you’ll share that expertise. Together, they give your brand its voice,
The Strategy: How To Build Pillars and Clusters To Fill Your Social Calendar
1. Define Your SEO Pillars and Clusters (the What) and Social Media Content Pillars (the How):
These stay consistent; they’re the personality your content takes on to keep it from being one-dimensional. If you’re starting out, consider who your brand persona is:
- The expert brand: If you’re in a complex field like legal, health care or finance, you might lean heavily into educational content to unravel technical topics, and inspirational posts to show where you can lead your audience.
- The lifestyle brand: If you’re selling based on aspiration — for instance, travel, fitness or coaching — inspiration and community might be your primary drivers.
- The utility brand: If you solve practical problems, educational and promotional content that focuses on how-to and clear calls to action empowers your audience to secure solutions with your help.
- The silly brand: If your brand is lighthearted and fun, you can focus on entertaining content and humorous behind-the-scenes posts.
If you’re established or already experimenting, head to your social media analytics dashboard and see which delivery style gets the most engagement from your existing content. A good rule of thumb is the 80/20 rule: 80% of your content should provide value through education, entertainment, community and the like, and 20% should be strictly promotional.
To find the right content buckets and build your clusters, you have several options:
- Mine your inboxes for common audience queries.
- Run a poll to gauge audience interest in certain topics.
- Conduct a competitor analysis to identify content gaps in the competitive space.
Just remember, they should align with your expertise, audience needs and your business.
2. Map Clusters Across Pillars
Take each of your pillars and generate ideas to deliver value to your audience. If you’re planning week by week, you could use three content pillars and one cluster to generate ideas.
Here’s an example from the veg chefs for their knife skills cluster:
- Educational: How To Sharpen Knives Safely.
- Behind-the-scenes: What’s in the Sous Chef’s Knife Roll?
- Entertaining: Knives You Should Never Put in the Dishwasher: Facts From an Over-Qualified Dishie.
But you can mix the creative process up. If you’re scaling your social content and want to plan a few months in advance, it might make more sense to pick one pillar and one cluster, and then ideate related content in larger batches.
Here’s what that might look like:
- Social media pillar: Educational.
- Cluster: Healthy nutrition.
- Content: How To Make Kimchi; Top 10 Protein-Packed Meals on the Menu; Yogurt vs. Kefir: Which Is Better for Digestion?; Ultimate Guide To Macro Nutrients; 5 Vegetarian Recipes the Kids Will Actually Eat; Grow Your Own Vegetables Series.
Both these options are useful and achievable if you’re only posting a few times a week or have a lot of free time on your hands. If you want to seriously scale content across your social media channels, there are better ways.
3. Use AI To Generate Collateral Ideas
Jump onto your favorite Gen AI platform, plug in your pillars and clusters, and let it generate ideas for you. It takes way less time, and you may end up with more comprehensive topical coverage. In fact, you can use AI to help you figure out your clusters, too, if you want. It helps to provide the AI with context around brand guidelines, your audience, location and which platforms you’re ideating for, so each content piece stays aligned.
That said, it’s imperative that you apply human judgment to each content idea you approve, as AI cannot replicate that. For instance, if the vegetarian restaurant from above is a family restaurant, it might want to avoid funny knife bloopers. Kids in the audience may lack the safety mindset or maturity to refrain from trying bad ideas at home. Then again, you might say the same for some adults.
While we’re here, add your brand’s authentic twist, weaving in experiences, lessons and real-world situations. That’s what keeps your content genuine.
4. Sequence the Mix
To keep your social media calendar fresh and engaging with every post, schedule a blend of content pillars and clusters. Using a Google Sheet is a great way to visualize what’s coming up in the month and year ahead, ensuring you maintain balance.
Color-coding and using drop-down menus help you track everything as you go. Moreover, recording engagement metrics on the same sheet gives you a clear idea of what’s working and what’s not as you roll out. Use this data to refine your strategy as you go.
How AI Platforms Simplify Your Social Content Calendar Workflow
AI was built to automate repetitive or iterative work. Marketing-specific AI platforms like contentmarketing.ai can simplify your content pillar strategy big time. If you’re ready to scale or dig into the actual creative work, here are three ways AI can help:
- AI-powered topic discovery: An AI content strategy can spare you the strenuous ideation work, breaking down not only the relevant content ideas that speak to your pillars and themes, but also the content format and stylistic suggestions.
- Strategic content balancing: By batching your social posts, you can visualize how your content delivery will come across to audiences.
- Maintaining brand voice: Some platforms, like contentmarketing.ai, let you add your brand guidelines and audience personas so your messaging remains consistent and aligned over time.
Revive Your Social Calendar With AI Tools
Both types of content pillars work when you treat them as a structural necessity. Social pillars determine how you show up and your SEO pillars add depth and authority through topic coverage.
AI doesn’t invent the strategy — and it shouldn’t. While it can help you scale your process, discover relevant sub-topics, balance your content mix and maintain a consistent brand voice, the thinking and the message should always remain human. So, start by identifying your core themes and clusters, choose your social media pillars and let AI help out with the rest, filling your social calendar with dynamic content to grow your engagement.
