content-pillars

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

Use to define a brand's content pillars — the 3–5 recurring themes it posts about — the strategic backbone between the brand profile and the content calendar. Run when the user says "content pillars," "content buckets," "what should I post about," "content themes," "content strategy," "pillars," or before planning a batch or calendar. Reads brand-profile first and derives pillars from positioning, point of view, audience, and proof — real ownable themes, never generic "educational / behind-the-scenes / promotional" buckets (those are intents and formats, not pillars). Produces a content-pillars.md that batch-content-plan and the content skills read. Works for any business: B2B, ecommerce, local, personal brand, nonprofit.

3installs

Sourcesocial-media-skills/skills

Added on2026-08-14

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add social-media-skills/skills content-pillars

SKILL.md Content

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Content Pillars

Content pillars are the few recurring themes a brand returns to — the strategic layer between who the brand is (

brand-profile

) and what it posts this week (

batch-content-plan

). Good pillars make a feed coherent, ownable, and infinitely easy to plan; their absence is why so many brands post random things that add up to nothing.

The single most important idea in this skill — and the thing almost everyone gets wrong:

A pillar is a theme you own. It is NOT an intent or a format. "Educational," "behind-the-scenes," and "promotional" are not pillars — educational is an intent (the job a post does) and behind-the-scenes is a format/treatment. A real pillar is a subject area like "payroll without a specialist" or "the craft of coffee, demystified." Get this distinction right and everything downstream gets sharper. See
references/what-makes-a-pillar.md
.

When to use this

After
```
brand-profile
```
, before planning content at any scale.
When the user doesn't know "what to post about," or their feed feels random.
When
```
batch-content-plan
```
needs pillars and none are defined.

When NOT to use this: if a current

content-pillars.md

exists, load it, summarize it, and move on unless the user wants to revisit it.

Step 0 — Read the foundation first

Load

brand-profile.md

(and

voice.md

). Pillars are derived from strategy — positioning, point of view, audience, proof, offers — not brainstormed from thin air. If there's no brand profile, run

brand-profile

first; pillars built without it are guesses.

Step 1 — Mine the brand profile for raw material

Pull the candidate sources (see

references/deriving-pillars.md

):

Positioning + point of view → the signature pillar (the thing the brand wants to be known for; the hill it will die on).
Audience jobs-to-be-done / pains → audience-relevant pillars (their problems, not your features).
Proof + expertise → credibility pillars (what the brand can authoritatively teach).
The human / brand story → a connection pillar.
Offers / product → at most one conversion-linked pillar, used sparingly.

Step 2 — Generate candidate pillars

From each source, draft candidate themes. Aim wide first (8–12 candidates), phrased as subjects, not formats — "small-business money mistakes," not "educational posts."

Step 3 — Test and select 3–5

Run each candidate through the pillar test (

references/what-makes-a-pillar.md

):

Ownable — can you say why this brand specifically is credible or distinctive here?
Relevant — does the target audience genuinely care?
Strategic — does it advance a real goal (awareness, trust, conversion)?
Sustainable — can you brainstorm 10+ post ideas from it right now?

Keep the 3–5 strongest. A candidate that fails ownable or sustainable is not a pillar. Fewer, sharper pillars beat more, vaguer ones — a feed with eight themes has none.

Step 4 — Define each pillar

For every selected pillar, capture: a clear name, what it covers, why the brand owns it, who it's for, the goal it serves, 5–8 example angles/sub-topics, and the proof/assets it draws on. This is what makes pillars usable by the planning and content skills. See

references/pillar-template.md

.

Step 5 — Balance the mix

A healthy pillar set has:

One signature pillar — the differentiator, the brand's distinct POV. Every brand needs one.
Supporting pillars — audience problems, credibility, connection.
At most one conversion-linked pillar, used as the minority (promotion rides on the value the others create — see the mix logic in
```
batch-content-plan
```
).

Spread the pillars across goals so the brand isn't all-teaching or all-selling.

Step 6 — Write the artifact

Produce

content-pillars.md

using

references/pillar-template.md

. Summarize it back to the user, flag the signature pillar, and invite one round of edits.

batch-content-plan

and the content skills will read this on every task.

Quality bar — self-check

Are the pillars themes, not intents or formats? (No "educational" as a pillar.)
Is each one ownable — with a reason this brand is credible/distinctive on it?
Is each audience-relevant, not just brand-interesting?
Could each generate 10+ post ideas (sustainable)?
Is there exactly one signature pillar, and is promotion a minority?
Are there 3–5, not eight vague ones?
Does each pillar trace back to something real in the brand profile?

Edge cases

User lists generic buckets ("educational, BTS, promo") → explain those are intents/formats, and convert them into real themes derived from the brand.
Too many candidate topics → narrow to the 3–5 that best pass the pillar test.
Brand with no obvious distinctive theme → mine the POV and audience pains harder; if there's truly no differentiation, the signature pillar becomes voice + a consistent angle, and you say so honestly.
Personal brand / creator → pillars are person-led (what they're known for, their journey, their craft); keep them tied to the person, not a faceless topic list.
Multiple audiences (e.g., nonprofit: beneficiaries + donors) → some pillars may serve different audiences; note which.
Multi-product / broad business → resist one pillar per product; pillars are audience themes, not a catalog.

Related skills

```
brand-profile
```
— read first; supplies positioning, audience, POV, proof.
```
audience-research
```
— deepen audience pains that feed audience pillars.
```
batch-content-plan
```
— consumes pillars to build the calendar.
The content skills (
```
caption-writer
```
,
```
reels-script
```
, …) — each post is tagged to a pillar.

References

```
references/what-makes-a-pillar.md
```
— the definition, the pillars-vs-intents-vs-formats distinction, the pillar test, anti-patterns.
```
references/deriving-pillars.md
```
— the method for mining the brand profile into pillars.
```
references/pillar-template.md
```
— the content-pillars.md output schema.
```
references/examples.md
```
— ownable pillar sets across six business types.