What on earth are content pillars?

“Content pillars” is a term that’s thrown around a lot in the world of social media management. For those of you who are new to the concept, take a sip of your coffee and let’s begin with a simple analogy using a restaurant:

Take a successful restaurant, with the ethnicity of the food served representing the industry vertical of your business. Now, think of each table in the restaurant as a social media channel. At each table, there are different customers, who all have different tastes and ideas of what exactly they want to eat. It’s safe to assume; guests at an Italian restaurant want Italian food, but which dish? How do restaurants service all their customer’s potential choices? They make use of menus. Menus allow for the chefs and waiters to prepare better.

The Menu to Success

Content pillars help to make sure you have a wide enough menu to keep everyone happy at the restaurant. The chef knows how to cook everything on the menu and has all the correct ingredients ahead of time. Essentially, menus form the staple everyday posts for each channel. That’s not to say that occasionally someone might order something off the menu, but that’s up to the waiter to manage expectations and the chef to execute.

Here are 7 reasons to use content pillars in social media:

1 . Content Pillars Save You Time.

Taking the time to map out content pillars will ultimately save you time in the long run. Say goodbye to those post blocks, sitting scratching your head thinking what should I post? By having a menu to use, you’ll be surprised at how much extra time you can free up. Free time is something every Social Media Manager loves. You can now better divide your time, and focus on the more flashy and ambitious bits of content (or perhaps that last-minute bit of requested off-menu client content).

2. Easy To Convey.

Whether you are the one physically creating the content, or enlisting the help of a hoard of Adobe dwelling designers, formulating well thought out content pillars will let you communicate concepts better. The pillars create familiarity, and templates can often be used when creating repeatable content. All in all, you or your team, will be on the same page and may not have to create each bit of content from scratch each time.

3. Cycles of Success.

Success is no accident. By creating and implementing content pillars, identifying your content that performs the best will be far easier.

So whether your audience is more interested in that #ThursdayTopTip or user-generated content you will know. Allowing you to better select what goes into your content calendar.

4. Content Spread.

Variety is the spice of life! No one wants to see the same thing over and over. Making use of content pillars will enable you to manage your spread of content more evenly across your social calendar. The last thing you want to do is have back to back testimonial posts on your page.

5. Produce Enough Content.

When faced with a whole multitude of social accounts, across multiple networks for different brands, making sure they’re well fed is a daunting task! As a Social Media Manager, a key duty is making sure you’re producing and scheduling enough content. So, going back to the analogy from earlier, imagine as a waiter, you walked into the full restaurant where every person could order anything they wanted, what a nightmare right?! Wouldn’t you prefer if they all had the same menu to look at when making a choice?

6. Consistent Voice & Quality.

By using content pillars, remaining on brand becomes less of a worry.

Maintaining the correct social voice and content quality is an important thing for brands as it aids in creating social trust. With consistent quality, clients can essentially sign off on a large amount of autonomous day-to-day content, again freeing up more time.

7. Less Stress.

Let’s face it, stress is something we could all do without. Less stress means less pressure, fewer mistakes, being proactive and not reactive. Being a Social Media Manager is stressful enough! So don’t add to it. A bit of pre-thinking can go a long way when it comes to handling the stress of content management.

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