Defining Your Content Pillars | LinkedIn Guide

The Goal

The goal of posting content on LinkedIn is to give people a 360-degree view of who you are as an individual, who your company is, and how you think about your industry. You do this by repeatedly hitting on the same core themes from different perspectives, different angles, and different stories.

You are not trying to go viral once. You are trying to build a body of work that, over time, makes it unmistakably clear to anyone following you what you stand for, what you know, and how you can serve them.

We break content pillars into three categories: personal, company, and industry. Each one serves a different purpose. All three are necessary. The recurring theme across all of them (regardless of the pillar) is that the best content takes the form of a story and carries a unique point of view.

Pillar 1: Personal-Themed Content

This is the pillar that makes people connect with you as a human being before they ever evaluate your product or company. It is the strongest and quickest level of connection you can build with someone on social media, and it consistently outperforms every other content type across the data we have on our clients.

Personal content answers questions like:

What is your personal timeline?
Where is your earliest point of relevance?
What happened in your childhood or early career that led you to where you are today?
What were the pivotal moments, the turning points, the decisions that shaped the path you took?

Break your timeline down by the key dates and events. For example, the job that changed how you thought about your career. The person who gave you advice you still follow. The failure that redirected you. The decision that felt risky at the time but turned out to be the most important one you ever made.

This is where you share the version of yourself that your professional bio leaves out. The version that makes someone reading your post think "I've felt that too" or "I've been in that exact situation."

Personal content is strategic. When a prospect reads a personal post and resonates with it, they form a connection with you that no product demo can replicate. When they eventually need what you sell, you are someone they feel like they already know.

Examples of personal-themed posts:

The story of how you started your company and what you were doing the week before
A lesson you learned from a mentor or family member that you still apply today
A mistake you made early in your career that shaped how you lead now
The moment you decided to leave your last job and what that decision actually felt like

Pillar 2: Company-Themed Content

This tends to be the default for most executives. It is the pillar that shares how your company operates, how you think about hiring, how you build product, how your team works together, how you make decisions.

Although this is the company-themed pillar, the same principle applies: the best-performing content takes the form of stories. Not announcements. Not press releases. Not "we're excited to share" posts. Stories.

Instead of "We just hired a new VP of Engineering," write about why you hired them. What was the gap on the team? What did the interview process look like? What question did they answer that made you say "this is the person"?

Instead of "We just launched a new feature," write about the customer conversation that led to building it. What did they say? What were they struggling with? How did the team react when they heard the feedback?

Company-themed content gives people a window into how you operate. It builds trust because transparency builds trust. When a prospect reads about how you make hiring decisions or how you handle customer feedback, they are evaluating whether they want to do business with you without ever getting on a sales call.

Examples of company-themed posts:

A hiring decision that taught you something about what you actually need on the team
The internal process behind a product decision, what you built, what you killed, and why
A team tradition or ritual that defines your culture
A deal that almost fell apart and how your team saved it

Pillar 3: Industry-Themed Content

This is the opportunity to share how you think about your industry. It is where you react to news, share takes on trends, and position yourself as someone who sees the market differently than everyone else.

This pillar gives you the best-performing content when done correctly because you accomplish two things at once. You become a trusted source for industry perspective, and you showcase your unique point of view. You attract the people who agree with you and repel the people who don't. Both of those outcomes are good.

What you do not want to do is be a regurgitative news source. Sharing an article with the caption "interesting read" adds no value. What you do want to do is take the news, apply your lens, and give people something they can only get from you. We call it a spiky point of view. The spikier the take, the better the content performs, because it forces people to react.

The formula is simple: industry event or trend plus your unique interpretation based on your experience equals a post worth reading.

Examples of industry-themed posts:

A competitor made a move. Here is what it actually means based on what you see from the inside.
A macro trend is shifting the market. Here is how it affects your customers and what they should do about it.
A commonly held belief in your industry is wrong. Here is why, based on data or experience that only you have.
A piece of news broke this week. Here is the take nobody else is giving because they don't have your vantage point.

The Split

We recommend an equal rotation across all three pillars. If you are posting five times a week, that is roughly 1-2 personal, 1-2 company, and 1-2 industry posts per week.

If we had to rank them by performance across the data we have on our clients, personal-themed content performs best, industry-themed content performs second (the spikier the take, the better), and company-themed content performs third. All three are equally important because they serve different purposes in building the full picture of who you are.

The Content Uniqueness Test

There is one test that every piece of content should pass before you post it.

If the post could be published on any other profile, like your co-founder's, your colleague's, or a competitor's, and still make sense, it is not a valid piece of content.

Great content is unique in two dimensions. First, it is written in your tone and voice. Not a generic LinkedIn voice. Yours. The way you actually speak. Second, it is uniquely yours because of the experiences you have lived. The stories, the lessons, the mistakes, the wins, those belong to you and cannot be replicated by anyone else.

If a post is interchangeable with something anyone in your industry could have written, it will perform like something anyone in your industry could have written. Which is to say, it will not perform at all.