Inside Girls Get Off’s battle to go viral with Meta - and how they won

Jo and Viv, founders of Girls Get Off. Image provided by, and copyright, Girls Get Off.

We’re spicing up the blog this week with guest blogger Lillie Rohan, Communications Queen at at Girls Get Off (GGO) - an unapologetically bold, female-led, sexual wellness brand. Lillie has worked for a number of major publications including the New Zealand Herald, Metro.co.uk and The Daily Mirror. Currently freelancing as a journalist, copywriter, word nerd, and PR queen, Lillie loves being able to tell the stories of people changing the world.

Over to Lillie…

Whipping cream with bullet vibrators and demonstrating elite fingering methods on papaya wasn’t exactly the social media strategy Girls Get Off co-founders Jo Cummins and Viv Conway had in mind when they launched their sex toy business in 2020, but that’s the thing about plans, they often go awry.

Four years, 12 sex toys and a love-hate relationship with Meta later, it’s a lesson the two New Zealand women have learnt more times than they can count, and it’s resulted in a hugely successful epiphany: social media strategy is out, chaos is in.

It all kicked off on a very lazy Sunday when Viv was analysing the brand’s latest Instagram analytics. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great, and she couldn’t understand why.

Then, a woman with a British accent and a perfectly tied bun popped up on her feed and said: “If you’re using your company Instagram like it’s a boardroom and not the pub round the corner, you’re doing it all wrong.”

It was a lightbulb moment. Up until that point, the female pleasure-focused company had been using the perfectly curated grid concept for their social media account. Everything looked pretty, everything matched a certain tone and if you were a Millennial social media manager in 2018, it was a dream come true.

But it wasn’t 2018, it was 2024, and Millennial Clean was out, Gen Z’s mess was in. Viv and Jo knew they really needed to make a change if they ever wanted to hit that 100,000 follower mark, especially as Meta’s restrictions on posting sexually suggestive or advertising adult products meant their business wasn’t, and still isn’t, eligible for paid ads on Instagram.

“When there’s a will, there’s a way, and we were already dabbling in a bit of rogue content like vagina costumes and cheeky billboard pop ups, but we knew we could get wilder,” Viv explains. “I’d been driving myself insane brainstorming, then one day I was mid-cake-bake, getting DMs about our new bullet vibrator Polly, and I just thought, ‘Screw it, I’m gonna whip this cream with ten vibrators and film the whole process.’ That was the moment things clicked.”

Viv expected a few “haha” comments in response, and she got them, but what she didn’t expect was that the video also received comments from people thanking her for the unexpected vibrator education. Not only did it show the power of Polly, but also the size, something that can be hard to communicate as an e-commerce store.

From there, the Kiwi-founded-Aussie-based brand, which is all about making female pleasure normal, started leaning into what they call “unhinged content”, and while it’s there to provoke a few laughs and quality engagement, it’s also a way to prioritise education around sex toys and female pleasure.

“Our mission has always been to remove the stigma surrounding women and pleasure and we knew that to do that, we had to become a best friend for our community and offer them a place where they didn’t feel shamed or judged,” Jo says. “To do that, we don’t want to force education on them or make them feel like we know everything and they don’t, so we decided to have some fun with it.”

Whipping cream with 10 vibrators soon turned into their viral Making A Cake With A Vibrator series. Again, it’s not educational from the outset, but helpful for the Girl’s Get Off community who want to get a grasp on how the size and power of the vibrator, and also, a great way for Jo and Viv to promote new products.

The strategy began growing legs, and in the past three months alone, these types of videos have been receiving anywhere between 500,000 and one million views, resulting in the pair now also using it to convey sex positions, tips and tricks.

“We started with ‘Couple’s Yoga’, which is all about sex positions you can do with your partner in a super PG, Meta-approved way,” Viv smiles. “Then, instead of using anatomically correct diagrams, we use what we’ve got on hand: a papaya or pillowcase for a vagina, a balloon for an anus, a cactus or toy cleaner bottle for a penis. We’ve even run a hose over our Freak Sheet (our waterproof sex blanket) in the middle of the street to demo how squirting works. It’s deliberately low-fi, hilarious, and gives our community answers to the questions in a super fun way.”

girlsgetoff A post shared by @girlsgetoff

It turns out that the less they overthought their strategy, the better it was received and in the eight months since they started getting extra silly on Instagram, they’ve doubled their following. It’s a massive turnaround for the brand who were “stuck in an 80,000 jail” for the better part of 3 months. At the time of writing, they have officially reached 163,000 followers on Instagram.

Jo admits that it’s not all about followers; they also have to focus on engagement, sales, and other “boring business details,” but it is validating to see that their shake-up is working.

“We think this ‘unhinged education’ is working so well because it kind of bypasses shame,’ Jo explains. ‘Without saying the words, we are telling our community, sex is normal, your pleasure is important, and you’re allowed to laugh and learn at the same time. On the surface, we’re giving them a giggle but dig a bit deeper and we’re actually dismantling old school taboos one chaotic video at a time.’

girlsgetoff A post shared by @girlsgetoff

So, while Girl’s Get Off isn’t treating their social media as a “pub”, more like a girl's night, complete with a few cocktails, it’s working for them, and they’re encouraging other businesses to do the same.

“Think outside the box, go rogue, whip some cream with your vibrators,” Viv laughs. “You never know what it will result in.”

Thank you Lillie and Girls Get Off. If you’d also like to get down with the All About Digital Marketing blog, comment below or email louisaguiseauthor@gmail.com.

Leave a comment

Louisa Guise is a Digital Marketing and Communications Professional and the author of How to Leave a Group Chat, a book about communication and smartphones. Subscribe to All About Digital Marketing for more gems like this.