Content pillars: choosing what you post about

A content pillar is one of the few subjects a presence keeps coming back to. Pillars do two jobs. For readers, they make an account legible: after a handful of posts, people know what they will get if they follow. For the person writing, they turn “what should I post this week?” into a smaller question, “what do I have to say this week about one of these things?”, which is much easier to answer.

Where good pillars come from

A pillar has to pass two tests. The first is that you know the subject from the inside. You can write about it for a year from your own experience, without leaning on other people’s summaries, and you have details nobody else has: your numbers, your decisions, your customers’ questions. The second is that your intended audience wants to read about it. A subject that passes only the first test gives you material nobody asked for; one that passes only the second puts you in competition with everyone else writing about it, with nothing of your own to add.

For a founder, the subjects that pass both tests usually come from the work: how the product gets built and why, how the company sells, hires or prices, what customers teach you, what went wrong. For a company page the pillars are different, because the page speaks for the company rather than for a person: what the product does and how to use it, what has changed in it, the problems it exists to solve. See personal profile vs company page.

How many

Three or four is a workable number. With one or two, the account gets repetitive and you run out of fresh angles. With six or more, the account stops being legible, and in practice most of them go unused. Write each one down as a short phrase with a sentence of scope, for example “Pricing: how we set and change prices, and what customers said when we did”.

Testing them

Pillars are hypotheses, and they are cheap to test. Post under each one for a couple of months, then look at two things. First, did you find it easy to come up with ideas for it, or did you have to force them? Second, did the posts under it draw the response you wanted from the people you wanted, which is usually visible in who comments rather than in how many react? A pillar that fails the first test should go; one that fails the second may need a different angle before it goes.

Keeping them from becoming a cage

The strongest objection to pillars is that they make an account predictable and can stop you writing about the thing that actually happened this week. It is a fair concern. The answer is to treat pillars as a default, not a rule: most posts should sit under one, and the occasional post that does not is fine when you have something genuinely worth saying. What pillars guard against is the slow drift into posting about whatever is trending because nothing else came to mind.

Pillars also shift as the company does. A founder who wrote about fundraising for a year and has now raised will have less to say about it and more about hiring. Revisiting pillars a couple of times a year, and replacing the one you have stopped having ideas for, keeps the account honest.