Are Content Pillars Dead?

On a coaching call a few weeks ago, our client talked about how she didn’t know what to post and wasn’t excited about posting anymore.

She knew what content pillars were and probably had gone through the process of defining hers before. But that framework was no longer working for her.

So how else do you think about defining what will be on your social media?

For a while now, I’ve thought of content pillars as one form of building guardrails for what you choose to post. The main idea is to simplify decision-making. We all have a shortage of time on our hands, so narrowing down the possible options of things to post about makes it much easier to brainstorm and create content.

Content pillars are only one of a few different possible guardrails I’ve seen over the years. One of the problems I’ve started to see with content pillars is there isn’t really one accepted definition of what your content pillars actually are (creating confusion when implementing them).

Singular focus accounts are another approach (also tend to perform rather well), for example people that find a style of education, skit, or focal topic and just make everything around that one topic (*@dash_and_furious is a great example of singularly focusing on a corgi*)

While talking with our coaching client I realized that we’d all grown up with a version of “guardrails” in our elementary cafeteria that was both visually memorable and super easy to understand.

If you haven’t guessed already, it’s the food pyramid. Visually it divides up all the food you need to eat in a day to be healthy into groups with rough portion sizes for each. I’m aware it has its problems, and the US moved away from using this version in 2005, this is what it looked like when they were still using it:

The fact that 20 years later I can still remember this pyramid but struggle to remember what our social media “guardrails” are says that maybe this would make a really good framework to start thinking about what we post on social media.

Since that coaching call I’ve been thinking about what our social media content pyramid would look like if I was to copy the USDA’s simple visual metaphor (didn’t Oscar Wilde say “Imitations is the sincerest form of flattery”?)

One of the most memorable features of a pyramid is the different sizes of the “cubes”, which visually shows that some groups should be bigger than others. And they go a step further to define the number of servings per day for each group.

When someone goes to your profile on Instagram they’re most likely to see your last 9 posts. So the basis of the Content Pyramid I’m building will be based on how many of the most recent 9 posts will come from each category.

For fun this week I put together this template in Canva that you can copy/print out if you want to try this out yourself:

Not every category has to be filled, as you can see by the example below we didn’t use all 6 categories. What is important is that all of your categories add up to 9 posts.

Is this meant as a tool that will be set in stone to never changed, nope.

My recommendation on how to figure this out for yourself:

1. Look at your last 9 posts, what are your categories and amounts of each?

2. Ask yourself if that aligns with what you want to be known for AND what your business is marketing right now (they’re both important)

3. Post 9 posts then come back and re-evaluate and make adjustment

“Perfect” is the enemy here, it’s going to be messy, you’ll have to adjust, and eventually you’ll find a balance that’s “good enough”. The goal is finding something that simple enough to understand, makes knowing what to post about easier, saves you some decision fatigue, and most importantly keeps getting used.

Shockingly similar to the goals of Content Pilliars, it’s just a different way of doing a similar thing. For different people different tools work better - I’ve just found this more intuitive for myself.

Here’s my first pass at what our content pyramid would look like:

How do you think about “guardrails” for your social media? Are you a diehard content pillars girlie? Hit reply love to know what your content pyramid looks like, if you choose to try it out!

Lyndon

You can see more deets on our coaching and branding packages on our website.