New: 98,000+ skills indexed from GitHub repos with 100+ stars · every skill safety-checkedBrowse top skillsTop skills
Esc to closeBrowse all skills
Submit a skillBrowse skills
Submit a skillBrowse skills

Agent skill

Content Pillars

by social-media-skills in social-media-skills/skills

A skill your agent uses 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.

MITAuto-check passedWriting & Content

Install Content Pillars

skills CLI
$ npx skills add social-media-skills/skills --skill content-pillars -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install social-media-skills/skills content-pillars --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/social-media-skills/skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/content-pillars .claude/skills/content-pillars && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
content-pillars
GitHub stars
134
Token cost
~1.7k tokens
SKILL.md length
839 words
Files
6 (incl. references)
Skills in repo
106
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses 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.

  • Works in 7 steps: Read the foundation first → Mine the brand profile for raw material → Generate candidate pillars → …
  • Says content pillars
  • SKILL.md covers When to use this, Step 0 — Read the foundation…, Step 1 — Mine the brand… and Step 2 — Generate candidate…, plus 8 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Content Pillars is an agent skill from social-media-skills/skills. 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 /…

Its SKILL.md is about 1.7k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. The skill folder holds 7 other files, including reference files (for example `evals/evals.json`, `references/deriving-pillars.md` and `references/examples.md`).

It sits in Writing & Content, covering Content strategy. The repository describes itself as: 106 social media skills for AI agents - strategy, writing, video, design, platform growth, publishing, and analytics. Works with Claude, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes & 40+ agents. The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Says content pillars
  • Content buckets
  • What should I post about
  • Content strategy

Example prompts

  • “content pillars,”
  • “content buckets,”
  • “what should I post about,”
  • “/content-pillars”

Workflow steps

7 steps, taken from the step headings in SKILL.md.

  1. Read the foundation first
  2. Mine the brand profile for raw material
  3. Generate candidate pillars
  4. Test and select 3–5
  5. Define each pillar
  6. Balance the mix
  7. Write the artifact

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 6e30eeb. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Content Pillars loads about 1.7k tokens when it runs, and up to ~5.1k if it reads all its reference files. Until then it costs about 187 tokens; SKILL.md has 839 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~187
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.7k
With references · SKILL.md plus every file in references/, read only if the agent opens them
~5.1k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from social-media-skills/skills at commit 6e30eeb, republished under its MIT licence (© social-media-skills). 839 words, ~1,748 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/content-pillars/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder). This skill also uses 5 other files; get the full folder from GitHub.
name
content-pillars
description
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.
metadata.version
1.0.0
license
MIT

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):

  1. Ownable — can you say why this brand specifically is credible or distinctive here?
  2. Relevant — does the target audience genuinely care?
  3. Strategic — does it advance a real goal (awareness, trust, conversion)?
  4. 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.

Show full SKILL.md (365 more words)Show less

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.
  • 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.

© social-media-skills, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 5 other files (references) in skills/content-pillars of social-media-skills/skills.

  • SKILL.md
  • evals/evals.json
  • references/deriving-pillars.md
  • references/examples.md
  • references/pillar-template.md
  • references/what-makes-a-pillar.md

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 6e30eeb

Compare with similar skills

Content Pillars next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Content Pillars compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Content Pillars this skillsocial-media-skills/skills134—~1.7kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Blogger Distillerotter1101/blogger-distiller701—~3.8kAutomated safety check: NotesMIT
Linkedin Content Plannersergebulaev/linkedin-skills4.4k1 repos~2.1kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Blog Post Draftingluongnv89/claude-howto42k—~2.1kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
WeChat Hot Article AnalysisSpaceZephyr/creator-buddy1.6k—~847Automated safety check: PassNone
Brand Voice Content Creatordavila7/claude-code-templates33k3 repos~1.9kAutomated safety check: PassMIT

Similar skills

  • Blogger Distiller

    otter1101/blogger-distiller

    A skill your agent uses when the user wants to analyze or distill a blogger/account on Xiaohongshu or Douyin, benchmark a target creator, or diagnose their own content strategy.

    701 GitHub stars~3.8k tokensUpdated 18 days ago
    Writing & ContentAuto-check: notes

  • Linkedin Content Planner

    sergebulaev/linkedin-skills

    Generate a 7-day LinkedIn content plan from a theme, audience, and pillars.

    4.4k GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~2.1k tokens
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • Blog Post Drafting

    luongnv89/claude-howto

    Guides drafting a blog post from an idea and optional source material: research, brainstorming, outlining and version-tracked drafts, with user approval at each step.

    42k GitHub stars~2.1k tokensUpdated today
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • WeChat Hot Article Analysis

    SpaceZephyr/creator-buddy

    Fetches hot WeChat Official Account articles by sector or keywords and produces a data file and an HTML report with rankings, style patterns and writing references.

    1.6k GitHub stars~847 tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • Brand Voice Content Creator

    davila7/claude-code-templates

    Analyzes a brand's existing writing to lock in a consistent voice, then builds SEO blog posts and platform-specific social content around it.

    33k GitHub starsUsed in 3 repos~1.9k tokens
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

  • Ralph Copywriter

    muratcankoylan/ralph-wiggum-marketer

    A skill your agent uses when the user asks to "analyze my content", "learn my writing style", "research competitors", "find content angles", "improve my blog", "write like me", "embody my brand…

    778 GitHub stars~2.4k tokensUpdated 6 mo ago
    Writing & ContentAuto-check passed

More from social-media-skills/skills

All 106 skills in this repo

  • AI Image Editing

    social-media-skills/skills

    The AI image-editing router — inpainting/object removal, background removal, upscaling, outpainting, old-photo restoration, and retouch, routed task-first to the right engine.

    134 GitHub stars~2.1k tokensUpdated 9 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • AI Music And Sound

    social-media-skills/skills

    The AI music + sound-design skill for social -- original/licensed audio beds and sound design for Reels/TikToks/Shorts/videos.

    134 GitHub stars~1.9k tokensUpdated 9 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • AI Search Optimization

    social-media-skills/skills

    A skill your agent uses to get a brand and its content CITED and RECOMMENDED by AI answer engines — the GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) / AI-search-visibility skill.

    134 GitHub stars~2k tokensUpdated 9 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • AI Video

    social-media-skills/skills

    The model-agnostic AI-video router and brief — the counterpart to image-prompt.

    134 GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 9 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • AI Voiceover

    social-media-skills/skills

    The AI narration / voiceover mini-skill (ElevenLabs-led). An agent skill from social-media-skills/skills.

    134 GitHub stars~1.1k tokensUpdated 9 days ago
    Auto-check passed

  • Analytics And Reporting

    social-media-skills/skills

    Social media analytics and reporting — read native platform data honestly and turn it into next actions.

    134 GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 9 days ago
    Auto-check passed

Categories

Questions about Content Pillars

What does Content Pillars do?

A skill your agent uses 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. Content Pillars is an agent skill from social-media-skills/skills. 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.

When should I use Content Pillars?

Content Pillars fits situations like: says content pillars; content buckets; what should I post about; content strategy.

How do I install Content Pillars in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add social-media-skills/skills --skill content-pillars -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/content-pillars in social-media-skills/skills) into .claude/skills/content-pillars in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Content Pillars in Codex?

Run `npx skills add social-media-skills/skills --skill content-pillars -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/content-pillars in social-media-skills/skills) into .agents/skills/content-pillars in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Content Pillars in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add social-media-skills/skills --skill content-pillars -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/content-pillars, .gemini/skills/content-pillars, .github/skills/content-pillars and .opencode/skills/content-pillars in your project.

What does Content Pillars need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Content Pillars is instructions for the agent only.

Does Content Pillars access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Content Pillars safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Content Pillars use?

Content Pillars is published under the MIT licence (declared in SKILL.md). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Content Pillars use?

About 1.7k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 7k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full. Its references folder adds about 3.3k tokens, read only when the agent opens those files.

What are the alternatives to Content Pillars?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Content Pillars: Blogger Distiller (otter1101/blogger-distiller, 701 stars), Linkedin Content Planner (sergebulaev/linkedin-skills, 4.4k stars), Blog Post Drafting (luongnv89/claude-howto, 42k stars) and WeChat Hot Article Analysis (SpaceZephyr/creator-buddy, 1.6k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Content Pillars?

social-media-skills (a GitHub organization) maintains it in social-media-skills/skills, which has 134 GitHub stars. The repository holds 106 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on October 1, 2026.

Source: social-media-skills/skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.