Overview
Most accounts fail on consistency of subject, not consistency of posting. Pillars are the fix: three to five themes you commit to, so every post lands in a bucket instead of being one more unconnected thought.
Set them up in Settings → Content topics. New accounts get a first set generated during onboarding, straight out of your voice interview answers.
Active, candidates, archived
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Active | The pillars you have committed to. These are what the AI reads. You can hold up to 10, but three to five is where the strategy actually bites. |
| Candidates | Shelved suggestions kept on standby. Activating one refills the slot with a fresh angle, so there is always something in reserve. |
| Archived | Pillars you have retired. Kept so a theme you drop is not silently suggested back to you next week. |
Generating pillars
Click Generate and DemandBird proposes a set from two inputs, both of which come out of your voice interview:
- Your audience: the specific reader you write for.
- Your surprise: the thing you learned that other people still get wrong.
Both are shown at the top of the page and are editable there, so you can steer the generator without going back through the interview. If both are empty, DemandBird has nothing to work from and asks you to answer the interview first.
On a first run the cards stream in as they are produced. Star the ones you want, hit Refresh on the rest, and the un-starred slots are replaced in place while your picks stay put.
Committing your picks
Starring is not committing. When you commit, the starred cards move to Active and DemandBird enriches each one: it works out what news and discussion around that theme looks like, so suggestions later on can be current rather than generic. Everything you did not star is shelved as a candidate, not thrown away.
Adding your own
The generator is a starting point, not an authority. Use Add pillar to write your own: give it a label and, optionally, a hint about what you mean by it. DemandBird generates a few idea hooks to go with it. If that enrichment fails, the pillar is still saved (you asked for a pillar, so you get a pillar) and you are told the hooks are missing.
The discovery slot
Alongside your committed pillars sits one rotating discovery pillar. It is a deliberate wildcard: a theme adjacent to yours that you have not claimed yet. Rotate it whenever you want a new one, and it never repeats a label you already hold, have archived, or are currently being shown. It goes stale on its own after a while and offers to rotate.
Use it as a cheap experiment. If a discovery pillar keeps producing posts that land, promote it to Active.
Brand identity
The same page holds the workspace's brand identity: your positioning and your ideal customer. These are workspace-level, not personal, and they are injected into every draft alongside your voice. For an agency running a client workspace, this is where the client's identity lives, which is what keeps a client's posts from picking up the agency's positioning.
How pillars steer generation
Committed pillars are not decoration. They show up in three places:
- Compose suggestions. The “Pick from suggestions” start card lists your active pillars with idea hooks under each, plus current angles from the discovery enrichment. Click one and it seeds the draft.
- Every AI draft. Your pillars are passed to the writer as the themes you write about, as soft context. They tilt a draft toward your territory; they do not force an unrelated source into a pillar it does not fit.
- Weekly idea digests. The ideas DemandBird sends you are drawn from your active pillars.
Pillars and workspaces
Pillars belong to a workspace, not to you. Switch workspace and you get that workspace's pillars, audience, and positioning. Your voice follows you across all of them.
AI limits
Refreshing a pillar's idea hooks counts against your monthly post idea generation allowance, because that is what it is: DemandBird producing ideas for you.
Each idea-hook refresh counts as one. The counter resets on the first of the month. See every plan limit.
Building the pillars themselves is not metered. Generating a set, refreshing un-starred candidates, rotating the discovery slot, and adding a custom pillar are all free of the cap: they are setup, and a spent allowance should never be the reason a new account cannot finish getting set up.
The same idea allowance is shared with Mine my week in Compose. Your weekly idea digest does not spend it: DemandBird started that job, not you.