How to Build a Social Media Content Strategy

A social media strategy says who you are talking to and why. A content strategy says what you are going to publish on Tuesday. They are different documents and people conflate them constantly, which is why so many teams have a strategy and still stare at an empty composer.

This is the second one.

Pillars: three or four, no more

A pillar is a recurring type of thing you publish. Not a topic exactly, more a job the post does.

Three or four is the right number. Two is monotonous. Six is a list you will not remember, which means it will not influence anything.

A workable set for most businesses looks something like:

• What we are learning. Specifics from doing the work. The most under used pillar and usually the best performing one, because it is the only one nobody else can copy.
• What we believe. A position, argued. This is the pillar that gets replies and the one most people avoid because it risks disagreement.
• How to do the thing. Practical, useful, saveable. Reliable rather than spectacular.
• What we made. Product, launches, news. Necessary, and the one that quietly eats the whole feed if you let it.

Your set will differ. What matters is that each pillar serves the reader in a different way, so that a week's worth of posts does not read like one long advert with gaps.

Give each pillar a share

Rough proportions, not a rota. Something like: learning 30%, belief 20%, how to 30%, product 20%.

The point of the numbers is not precision. It is that at the end of a month you can look back and notice that product ate 60% because there was a launch, and that is why the replies dried up.

Format mix, honestly

Format is where content strategies go to die, because the plan is written by the optimistic version of you.

Be blunt about what you can actually produce every week without heroics. If video takes you three hours and you have one hour, video is not in your mix, whatever the engagement data says about it.

A mix that survives usually has:

• A low cost default. Text, or text plus a simple image. This is most of your volume.
• One medium cost format done well. A carousel, a proper photo, a short video.
• An occasional high cost piece. Once a month, not once a week.

The mistake is inverting that, planning around the high cost format and then producing nothing when the week gets busy.

Write down what you will not publish

This is the most useful paragraph in any content strategy and almost nobody writes it.

Examples that earn their place:

• No posts that are only a link with no thought attached.
• No engagement bait questions we would not ask a person at a table.
• No commentary on news we do not actually know anything about.
• Nothing that needs three rounds of approval to say something bland.

The exclusion rule works because it fires exactly when your judgement is worst: Thursday afternoon, nothing scheduled for Friday, and something is better than nothing. Something is frequently not better than nothing.

Review it against what happened

At the end of each month, put the plan next to the results.

The questions are simple. Which pillar actually performed against your own median? Which one did you plan and then not publish? Did the mix survive contact with the month?

Compare against your own history rather than an industry benchmark. An industry average is drawn from accounts nothing like yours, and it cannot tell you that your "what we are learning" posts run well above your own baseline while your how to posts sit under it.

The adjustment is usually small: move ten percent from a pillar that is not landing to one that is, and try again. Turning analytics into better decisions is about making that a habit rather than a one off.

Then put it in a calendar

Pillars and a mix are still abstract until they have dates on them. How to create a social media content calendar is the next step, and it is the version that fits in an afternoon.

FAQs

How many content pillars should I have?

Three or four. Fewer is monotonous, more is a list you will forget under pressure.

What if one pillar always performs better?

Shift the mix towards it gradually, but do not go to one hundred percent. A single note feed loses the readers who came for the other thing, and the strong pillar is often only strong because it sits against the others.

How do I know if a pillar is working?

Compare posts in that pillar against your own median rather than against each other. Twenty posts is roughly the point where the comparison starts meaning something.

Should the content strategy change per channel?

The pillars usually hold. The formats and the phrasing should not. The same idea has to arrive differently on LinkedIn and on X, which is what platform specific content is about.

How often should I rewrite it?

Adjust the mix monthly. Rewrite the pillars roughly twice a year, or whenever the business changes what it sells.