How to choose social media content pillars

Collect questions before naming categories

Review support conversations, sales questions, onboarding friction, and comments on existing posts. Write down the actual question and who asked it. Group related needs: learning a task, evaluating an approach, understanding a product, or seeing how others work. This produces more specific pillars than a brainstorm of broad themes disconnected from customers.

Select a few subjects you can sustain with evidence and examples. If a topic depends on expertise your team does not have, identify a qualified contributor or leave it out. A pillar is a commitment to useful repeated coverage; it is not a reason to publish a weak answer simply because the calendar needs another entry.

Define the boundary of each pillar

For every pillar, state the audience question, the value delivered, and a few eligible formats. Also name what does not belong. “Approval operations” might cover reviewer responsibilities, decision deadlines, and version control. It would not automatically include every general productivity quote or every software announcement.

Give one person responsibility for collecting examples and maintaining the source material. That person need not write every post. They should help distinguish an established fact, a team recommendation, and an experiment. Clear source ownership makes it easier for creators and reviewers to agree on what the post can claim.

Worked example: a social operations consultancy

The team chooses three pillars: review clarity, planning habits, and client coordination. Review clarity answers how teams make explicit decisions; planning habits covers calendars and deadlines; client coordination covers briefs and feedback. A post about naming a backup approver fits review clarity. A post about gathering the client’s campaign constraints fits client coordination.

For a ten-post planning period, the team assigns four posts to review clarity, four to planning, and two to client coordination because it has four strong examples in each of the first two areas. This 40/40/20 mix is an illustrative capacity choice, not a benchmark. If a timely client question deserves attention, the team can change the mix and record why.

Evaluate usefulness before changing the mix

Review each pillar over a meaningful set of posts rather than reacting to one unusually popular item. Look for the response appropriate to the objective: relevant questions, resource visits, qualified enquiries, or evidence that customers understood a task. Compare similar formats and audience contexts when possible, and avoid claiming that a correlation proves a particular pillar caused sales.

If one pillar is hard to produce, ask whether the category is vague, the source material is missing, or the audience need is weak. Narrow or retire it when appropriate. Keep a backlog of questions and revisit the definitions as the product and audience change. The practical test is whether a new creator can pick a suitable topic and explain why it belongs.

Prevent categories from becoming a quota exercise

Let one post belong to a primary pillar for planning while acknowledging that it may answer several questions. Do not split a strong explanation into weak fragments solely to fill category quotas. When the planned mix conflicts with audience usefulness, choose the useful post and record the planning change so the team learns from it.

Turn your mix into whole posts

Enter the number of posts you can actually produce and your chosen pillar percentages. The allocation adds up to your total; it is a planning aid, not a recommendation for an ideal content mix.

Where this fits in Slash Social

See content planning in Slash Social. These resources describe operating practices you can adapt to your team. Review current product availability before choosing a rollout.