Do You Still Need Content Pillars in 2023?
Content Pillars have been a topic of discussion in the world of social media for many years, and in a time of “unhinged” marketing tactics, reaction videos, and an endless stream of new meme templates, it’s not surprising that you might be wondering if they’re even relevant in 2023.
Well, we’re here to tell you - they are!
Not only are they a great way to organize your social media strategy, but they can act as a guiding light that will help you to create content truly aligned with your vision as well as your business’ goals. This will ensure that your authentic narrative remains consistently on display for your followers!
We’re going to step off our soapbox for a sec and dive into our handy guide for establishing content pillars for yourself.
You've heard of Content Pillars before... but what are they?
Content pillars are a set of topics, typically 3-5, that you will use as a foundation for all of the content you create.
They can be subjects that you plan to discuss directly, issues you want to amplify, or areas from which you draw inspiration. The most important thing is that they act as a consistent thread around which your narrative is woven.
These pillars are key to having a meaningful content strategy on any social platform, and in order to create them, you’ll first need to...
Outline Your Business Goals
Why are you on social media?
To get clients?
Promote your course?
Grow your following?
Expand your reach?
It’s time to get really clear about your purpose, and you may not want to hear this, but… that’s going to require some soul searching. So, dig deep, be honest with yourself about your goals, and decide why it is that you are on social media. That will help to lay a foundation for future content and will almost certainly lead to some inspiration.
Fortunately, it may also help you identify the audience you’re attempting to target, and now that you’ve found your why, it’s time to think about what your audience wants to see. So, you’ll need to…
Identify Your Audience Needs
Are you a psychologist, coaching people through intimacy issues in a clinical setting? You may not prefer to rely on trending Barbie memes to get your point across. Then again, maybe your goal is to reach a new audience and after that thoughtful bout of soul searching, you’ve decided that Barbie memes are exactly what the doctor ordered!
If you remember our last newsletter, we stressed the importance of honing in on your audience’s “problem,” and what you can do to solve it. This same line of internal investigation applies in this context, so if you need a refresher, you can check out the blog version of that newsletter here.
Once you’ve gotten through that refresher, and identified the problem your content can solve, try to conceptualize how your audience may want to digest the information you’re going to present.
These may seem like no-brainers, but walking down this road with us in a methodical fashion will help you construct your pillars.
Now that we’ve gotten through the soul searching and conceptualizing phase, it’s time to do a brain dump of potential pillars. We encourage you to think BIG! Start with large, overarching subjects - you can then narrow them down later!
Not quite sure where to begin? Don’t stress. Here are…
5 Ideas to Jumpstart Your Brainstorm
Inspire - Forge a deeper connection with your audience by showing them what inspired you to begin your journey of content creation and what inspires you to continue on that journey!
Why did you get into the sex-positive industry?
How did you start your business?
What motivates you on a daily basis?
Hint: this is where you share aesthetic photos, motivational quotes, your personal story, etc
Educate - Enlighten your audience about what you do, what you offer, your methods, your successes, your failures, and what’s going on in the wider community!
Tips & tricks
How-to guides
Case studies
Lessons learned
News and goings on in the SXP industry
Think Roe v Wade, SESTA-FOSTA, new toys, new techniques etc.
Entertain - If you know Queen Media, you know that we prioritize offering our audiences tangible value, but what is life without a little levity! Even the most educational account can benefit from some fun from time-to-time.
Transition videos
Before-and-afters
Memes
Pop culture references
Day-in-the-life
Ok, pause! The previous three sections are focused on the content you're releasing out into the world, but content pillars can also be inward-facing. These next two ideas are intended to motivate you, the creator, in the background.
Research - While it’s important to stay true to your vision, it’s important to keep an eye out for what’s going on around you and remain open to switching things up a bit. Here are a few ways that you can stay ahead of the trends in your sector and continue to deliver fresh, timely content.
Keyword research
See where the traffic is going on Google, Instagram & TikTok!
Stay up to date with current events
Google news alerts can be huge help
Follow and engage with other creators in your wider community
Reach out - This one isn’t for everyone, but if you already have an established community—even a small one!—try asking your followers and your peers what they want to hear from you. This might sound obvious, but trust us, you’ll appreciate this reminder down the road.
…
There you have it, folks! A solid foundation from which you can build your own content pillars.
Hungry for more? Join us over at The Queen’s Court for further deep dives on this subject and a slew of others!
Getting Started on Social Media: Tips & Tricks
Regardless of how much content you have, getting your social media presence up and running is HARD! Which is precisely why we dedicated an entire workshop to this very issue.
Fortunately for you, we distilled the most important takeaways into this article that you’re about to read, so lets’ dig in!
Make sure you grab your exact same handle on every platform ✅
You don’t need to be posting on every platform, but you DO want to make sure no one else takes your username.
Consistency is key. In 2023, there are numerous methods through which we can digest content, so it’s important to account for short attention spans and the good possibility that your followers will likely jump from platform-to-platform throughout the day.
As such, it’s important that your profile can be found on each platform; even if the majority of your profiles merely direct users to a single profile on your preferred platform.
Which is the perfect segway to…
Pick the platform you want to focus on 📲
We’ll say it again, folks - you don’t need to be posting on every platform.
Choose one - maybe two - that you want to focus on and then spend your energy creating thoughtful, authentic content that works on that platform . Once you’ve laid the groundwork, this content can be repurposed and posted across all of the other platforms where you’ve staked your username claim.
Identify Your Audience 👯♂️
Yes, everyone experiences some manner of hardships within their relationships.
Unfortunately, speaking to everyone won’t get you very far.
The goal of generalized content is to appeal to, and hopefully help, a wide audience, but more often than not, it is the focused and specialized content that will strike a chord on social media. Why? Well, quite simply, it will offer tangible value to a specific community, who in turn will rapidly share that content, thereby helping it achieve a wider (maybe even viral?) audience 🤲
So, ask yourself - who do you love serving? Who is your ideal client? Make sure your client avatar is clearly defined and keep them in the forefront of your mind with every post you make!
Identify Their Problems 👀
Ok, so, you’ve defined your audience.
Say your goal is to serve women, aged 45-60, who live in California and make over $100k per year. Now, you must identify their problems, so that you can form a plan of how to speak to them in an authentic way.
Are they concerned about menopause? Lack of libido? Dating after divorce? Feeling sexy in their LTR? 🤔
Sit down and think about 3-4 of their top everyday issues. Determine 3 solutions to each problem. There are your first social media posts! 🎉
Write a strong bio ✍️
Great work! You’ve identified your audience, honed in on their problems, and we’ve provided you with a solid springboard for your first posts.
Now, remember those short attention spans we mentioned earlier? You’ve got to capture these new, potential members of your audience quickly, and the way to do that is with a strong, clear bio 🗣
Curious what a strong bio looks like in practice? Use this outline:
Who are you?
What problems are you solving?
How do you provide value to your audience?
When you’ve clearly and concisely outlined your answers to the above questions in your bio, your ideal client/customer will feel like your profile was made for them.
Don’t Expect Sales Right Away 😳
We wish it wasn’t, but this one is really important.
Social media is good for Brand Awareness. We’ve all heard that term about a million times, but... what is brand awareness? It’s the business of getting your name out there, IN FRONT OF people, and building the “Like, Know and Trust” factor.
It’s only once your audience gets to like you, know you, and trust you, that they might take that trip down the funnel and begin to buy from you, or become your client!
…
Whew! We don’t know about you, but that felt like a serious whirlwind of information. You know why it felt like that? Because these are BIG issues that warrant long discussions and deep dives, and that is exactly what was delivered in the workshop that this article was based on!
The good news? If you choose to sign up for The Queen’s Court, you’ll get access to this workshop, plus a whole lot more. We also offer digital downloads of all past workshops, as well as special templates, copy ideas, and more! Plus, you’ll get access to bi-monthly Q+A sessions, implementation sessions, and a private Discord server populated by other like-minded sex-positive professionals.
Why Trending locations are important
For content creators in Portland, OR, the early days of spring mean one thing - it’s time to head on down to the waterfront and shoot a season’s worth of content under the cherry blossoms!
Now, you might not live in Portland, but there’s almost certainly a highly-instagrammable location near you and springtime is the right time to capitalize on that location’s IRL traffic using a geotag on your Instagram posts.
Before we outline exactly how this can be done, let’s talk about why geotags are such a powerful tool:
✅ When people travel to a destination and want to see what’s happening nearby, they will use Instagram’s explore feature by typing in the name of that destination.
They can then see a wide selection of posts tagged with that location.
Here’s the cool part:
If you use a trending geotag, you can show up in the explore feed. Better yet, if you create solid, engaging content, you show up at the 🔝 of the explore feed.
Frankly, you don’t even have to post content related to the location.
In fact, you don’t have to use “real” locations at all. For years, people have been using “virtual locations” for their geotags that are meant to be funny, quirky, or illustrative for the copy of the post.
In the end, geotags are low-hanging fruit that can easily be picked and could very well lead to brand new eyes becoming a part of your engaged audience.
Here are a few of our favorite locations that are to be packed with Instagrammers this spring:
🌸 Japanese Historic Plaza, Portland, OR or Cherry Blossom Festival, Washington, DC
🌷 Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve, Lancaster, CA
🌳 Central Park, New York, NY
🐎 Kentucky Derby Festival, Louisville, KY
And here are some of the best virtual geotags that we love to use:
💜 Love
👅 Pleasure Town
🌍 Planet Earth
🔗 Link in Bio
Let’s Talk About Meta Verified
The folks at Meta have introduced a new paid feature intended to help raise the profile of creators on its platform. If you’re like us, spending much of the day deciphering the ins-and-outs of social media, you’ve already read all about this, but if not, here’s a simple breakdown of what being “Meta Verified” actually means.
You’ll get a verified badge, and to get it, you’ll need to authenticate your account with a government-issued ID.
Meta will provide “proactive account monitoring” to protect against impersonation.
You’ll receive customer support from a real person [italicized because WOW!]
Honestly, those all sound great. The idea that, with a monthly fee, you can get actual customer support is pretty exciting. Whether or not these features will translate with a more powerful platform for creators remains to be seen, so let’s get down to the nitty gritty.
How much does it cost? 🤑
$11.99 per month on the web and $14.99 per month on iOS and Android.
Who is it for? 🤔
This is not for businesses, but for creators ONLY. We've seen some confusion on how they prompt you to sign up for the verification service within the IG app, but as far as we know, businesses cannot take advantage of this feature :(
Regardless of whether or not you think this makes sense, you’ve got to admit that after all these years of social media use, there’s something about that verified check mark that makes us trust the post just a little bit more. Maybe that extra customer confidence alone is worth an extra $15/month to you?
3 Tips to Keep Your Sex Positive Account Safe
This week's newsletter was spawned from a very fortunate conversation Queen P was able to have with a former TikTok employee, who used to work in their policy department 🤫
We sat in with other sex educators and sex positive podcasters to discuss:
✔️ what works for us on the TikTok platform
✔️ what measures we take to keep our accounts' safe
✔️ what actually trips up their algorithm that results in getting accounts flagged
Of course, as sex-positive content creators, we know it’s not a walk in the damn CGI park 🌳🚶♀️🌳
Fortunately, THERE IS HOPE.
We’ve got three things that you can do ~right now~ to keep your sex-positive account safe on Instagram.
📝 So, sharpen your pencil, or keep your mouse-clicking finger at the ready, because here we go…
✅ Check Your Account Status ✅
They don’t really make this an easy feature to access (because, why would they, right?), but you can find your Account Status in one of two ways:
👆 Click the Professional Dashboard on the profile page of your account, then find Check Account Status under Next Steps
👆 Go to Settings > Help > Account Status
Once you’ve navigated to the Account Status section, you can see which of your posts have been removed by the platform for violations, as well as whether or not your content is eligible to be recommended to people that aren’t following you, and, if ineligible, the posts that have made you so.
Note: If your account is ineligible for recommendation, then your content won’t appear in all of the places it needs to in order to be seen by non-followers - Explore, Search, Reels tab, etc.
🤔 What can you do about this? 🤔
1️⃣ You can dispute the violations by clicking “disagree with decision.” In our experience, it is possible to get violations removed, and once they're removed, they do not count as dings against your account.
2️⃣ You can remove the content in question and repost an altered version of the graphic/video/carousel, in hopes it won't get flagged again.
3️⃣ You can implement a minimum age requirement on your account, as well as certain branded content; something that we will cover in greater detail in the next section.
👀 Minimum Age Requirement 👀
This is an extremely simple way to fly under the Instagram content radar, and it can be implemented as soon as you finish reading this email. You can even set specific age limits country-by-country.
Now, we suggest setting your account to age 18, across the globe. This will help to ensure that your content isn’t seen, and subsequently flagged, by a younger user.
To do this, head over to your Settings > Business > Minimum Age, and you’re good to go!
🗣 Use CTAs Wisely 🗣
Here’s a tip that seems straightforward, but in practice, can get a bit muddy.
If your content is sexual in nature (e.g. about blowjobs, anal, penetration, etc) and includes a call to action that points off the platform, you’re treading in risky territory.
Instagram’s bots do not have the ability to visit every URL linked in a CTA, so if the platform encounters an overtly sexual post that points off the platform, the assumption will be made that that the URL could very well be a porn site.
This is an important fact to keep in mind when you’re sharing content, paired with CTAs, on both Instagram and TikTok!
As much as you want to share your juiciest, most engaging content, it’s important to focus on sharing educational content, while encouraging your audience to engage right there on the platform. Doing so will, in the end, increase your audience and preserve the audience you’ve worked so hard to build. Additionally, you can create specific content that encourages people to follow you elsewhere, while not necessarily sharing tips/tricks toward a better sex life.