As a business owner, crafting impactful, strategic social content can be a time consuming chore, and one that often produces minimal results.
Usually that's not a discipline problem. It's a framework problem. Posting consistently without a structure underneath it just means producing more of something that wasn't working.
So here is Forme's social content framework distilled into three steps. Work through these before you write a single caption and you'll have something you can plan against for the year, rather than starting from a blank page every Monday.
These are the primary categories of content you cover across all your social marketing. Some common ones look like this.
Authority content. Educational posts, how to's, step by steps, myths worth debunking, the questions your customers always ask.
Behind the scenes content. A day in the life, work in progress, packaging orders, how a project actually came together.
Entertaining content. Funny or relatable posts, jokes only your industry gets, story times.
Promotional content. Offers, launches, events, case studies, client wins.
One update on the original advice here. I used to recommend four to six pillars. Now I'd say three or four, and I'd push you toward three.
Fewer pillars means each one gets used often enough to become recognisable, which is the entire point. Six pillars across a normal posting schedule means you touch each one occasionally and your audience never builds an association with any of them. Forme runs three, which are educate, promote and engage, and that's plenty to plan a year around.
Keep promotional content to somewhere between twenty and twenty five percent of the total. Any more and the account stops being worth following.
Once your pillars are set, list specific content ideas under each one. That list is what you draw from when you're making reels, writing captions or filming stories, and it's the thing that saves you from the blank page.
To create content that connects with the right people, you have to be clear about who you're speaking to.
Dig out the target market profiles or brand personas from your brand strategy and work through whether your market would genuinely value each pillar. If a pillar or an idea within it doesn't connect strongly with the people you want, cut it. Being ruthless here is what lets you speak in their language, address their actual concerns and sound like you know them.
There's an important wrinkle now that didn't apply a few years ago. Most of your reach no longer comes from your followers. Platforms distribute content to people who have never heard of you, which means your audience is split into two quite different groups.
Cold viewers need a reason to care within about two seconds and no assumed context. Existing followers already trust you and want depth, proof and access.
So sort your pillars by which job they're doing. Some exist to be discovered, and those need to be broad, fast and immediately legible to someone who has no idea who you are. Others exist to deepen a relationship, and those can be slower, more specific and more revealing. A pillar that's trying to do both usually does neither.
For real engagement and genuine buy in, your market has to find value in your content immediately.
Work out what your people are lacking, what their pain points are and what they actually need. Then build content that meets it, whether that's through entertaining, educating, reassuring or solving.
Go back over your pillars and name the specific problem each one solves. If you can't articulate it in a sentence, the pillar isn't ready. This is also a useful filter for content ideas that feel fun but do nothing, which every business produces more of than it realises.
This is the part worth being straight about, because a lot of businesses build a beautiful framework and still don't grow.
Your pillars tell you what to talk about. They don't make anyone stop scrolling. That job belongs to the first line, the first frame and the first two seconds, and it's a separate skill from planning. Strong strategy delivered with a weak opening reaches nobody. The framework and the hook are two different problems and you need both.
Then measure the right things. Likes tell you very little. Saves, shares and sends tell you that something was useful enough to keep or pass on, which is the behaviour that actually precedes buying. Watch which pillars produce those, and which produce enquiries, and let the numbers reshape your framework over the year rather than treating it as fixed.
One idea should also travel further than one post. A strong piece of thinking can be a short video, a carousel, a story series, an email and a blog post. Businesses that seem to be everywhere usually aren't creating more, they're distributing better.
With strong pillars aimed at genuinely valuable content for the right people, you now have a strategic framework to plan against rather than a weekly scramble.
That's what turns social from a chore into something that compounds.
Share your favourite content planning tips, or follow along for more.
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