Duolingo on TikTok: The anatomy of a campaign

Duolingo is the hugely popular language learning app that’s famous for its green feathered mascot Duo, their notoriously passive aggressive owl. They have achieved phenomenal TikTok success, gaining more than 3 million TikTok followers in just over a year. Today, they stand at an incredible 4.7 million followers and over 93 million likes. But what was their secret behind their astronomical success? Gavin Crewe, from Sookio Bootcamp 3.0, explains…

For Duolingo, this achievement didn’t happen overnight. It took 18 months and the creative ideas of 23 year old Zaria Parvez, Duolingo's social media coordinator and a 2020 graduate of the School of Journalism and Communications at the University of Oregon, USA.

How Duolingo tapped into a new market with TikTok

Duo is well known by the app’s users for harassing and guilt-tripping them with reminders if they start to fall behind on their language learning. Little did the marketing team know at the time that this would be their angle for success with TikTok.

Their story began at the beginning of 2021, when Duolingo partnered with a third party agency to work on their #learnonTikTok campaign. The campaign consisted of users sharing unique words within their native languages during entertaining scenarios. The activity did ok but it didn’t really take off.

It wasn’t until Zaria noticed their large owl mascot sitting in a marketing meeting one day that she thought of bringing him into a TikTok video. Duo’s first video amassed 800,000 views and 130,000 likes, which was at least triple the views of their previous best-performing video. The team continued posting more of their previous style of content, but they knew they had stumbled on something when their next video featuring Duo received an incredible 3.5 million views and almost 730,000 likes, and one of their most popular videos has now received over 24 million views and 5 million likes.

Authenticity is the key to building trust on TikTok

So what made this content so lovable by us and Gen Z?

Duolingo discovered that funny content featuring their infamous owl resonated the most.

In fact, they found that videos that were off-brand, outside the box or even absurd attracted the most engagement. It is clear that this kind of marketing is seen as refreshing and is perhaps where a lot of brands have missed the mark on TikTok.

Duolingo’s messages are not aimed at promoting a product or selling a pitch; they seek to create memorable and hilariously entertaining moments.

They discovered that by focusing on being entertaining and gaining attention, their brand offering would resonate as a secondary message. When users think of learning a language, they will remember Duolingo, the app that makes learning fun. As Zaria explained in an interview with Techradar, “It was based on our human truth of what our team found, that language learning is hard and we make it fun, which is what Duolingo is all about”.

Awareness of topical trends is crucial in Duolingo’s TikTok strategy

Wait too long and you miss the boat.

So Duolingo also tied their content in with viral trends, releasing new videos in quick response to help gain traction. They received an instant hit with their Red Light, Green Light video, based on the massively popular Netflix series Squid Game.

They also reacted quickly to the NBA trade offer trend, where participants offer a trade of two funny or odd items. Duolingo’s first tier offering is free language learning, so in their video they offered to receive no money in return for Spanish lessons, push notifications and an owl friend, giving them a commercial angle.

Duo’s sarcastic personality is also used in user interactions, where the team often replied to messages with hilarious and witty remarks. Duo made the brand famous through his authenticity and ability to entertain.

Lessons we can learn from Duolingo’s success with TikTok

What has Zaria Parvez’s accomplishments taught us about tapping into the TikTok market? After all, thanks to their phenomenal success, Duolingo has become the number one education app in the Apple App Store. Social media is constantly evolving, and brands must understand how to maximise each platform and adapt  in order to resonate with its users.

Following on from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, TikTok has become the new platform to crack, and the rewards are high. As of 2021, TikTok has reached a milestone of 1 billion active users and The Drum has discovered that ads featured on TikTok are more memorable than those found on other platforms. This is because users expect the content they receive to be authentic, personable and engaging.

When targeting Gen Z, a savvy move by Duolingo was to hire someone from the same generation. Zaria was able to understand and tap into the TikTok audience. While the rest of the marketing team may not have understood the reasons behind their increasing success, they supported and empowered Zaria to carry out her strategy and vision.

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