How Duolingo’s social media team built a viral marketing strategy

A company’s social media marketing team doesn’t need a large staff or budget to be successful, but it does need support from leadership. 

That’s according to Duolingo’s Zaria Parvez, the senior global social media manager who’s helped the language education platform grow its TikTok following to nearly 17 million since she was hired in 2020 fresh out of college. 

She’s credited with popularizing Duolingo’s mascot, Duo the owl, on social media — and Parvez relied on Michaela Kron-Hags, Duolingo’s global marketing campaign director, for that success. Kron-Hags was the first person in leadership to say yes to her social media ideas, according to Parvez.

“We found that bringing evidence, data and examples of what others are doing can go a long way in putting execs at ease with what you’re trying to do,” Kron-Hags said on a panel last week at the Platform, an influencer marketing conference in East Liberty hosted by the Cohort, a community of Pittsburgh social media creators and influencers. 

During Parvez’s time with the company, Duolingo’s worldwide monthly active users have grown from 37 million to 116.7 million, according to investor relations data compiled by Statista. The company was also named Social Marketer of the Year in 2022 by the popular marketing media company Ad Age, becoming somewhat of the gold standard for brand social strategy. 

Lacking traditional marketing experience when she started at the company, Parvez approached TikTok with the mindset of an actual user of the platform. Over time, the positive response to this approach has helped her build trust with Duolingo’s leadership, though she acknowledges that it didn’t happen overnight.

Duolingo’s strategy starkly deviates from traditional corporate messaging and instead capitalizes on pop culture references and other outlandish marketing tactics. Not every company needs to adopt that approach, but they can learn from Parvez’s lessons on how to prove the value of their work to higher-ups in order to thrive. 

Simplify the decision-making process and allow creative freedom 

Despite Duolingo’s social media success, the team behind it remains small, consisting of just two full-time employees and a few contractors handling the day-to-day content, Parvez said. 

A key part of its success lies in a minimal approval process for social content, according to Kron-Hags. 

Once a week, the small team gathers to brainstorm ideas, often drawing inspiration from trending audio on TikTok. They assess which ideas they feel most strongly about, and then move quickly to creating the content. The next day, the team meets with the Duolingo mascot and a production assistant to finalize content. 

“This is a two-day cycle, and then we approve the content within the team ourselves, so we’re not waiting for senior leadership to say yes or no,” Parvez said. 

Despite the success of a fast-moving team, according to Parvez, this isn’t always common at publicly traded companies because of the risks of backlash that can come from social media marketing.

In certain cases, the team consults with Duolingo’s legal department, which sometimes advises them against participating in certain trends – a topic that’s even become a running joke on the company’s TikTok. 

Occasionally, an idea may be escalated to the chief marketing officer or shared in the company’s “Standards and Practices” Slack channel, where an external consultant provides an objective, unbiased opinion, according to Kron-Hags. 

While these serve as checks, the decision-making process remains simplified, and not everyone needs to be in full agreement for the team to move forward with an idea.

“Even if everyone internally is not happy, if it’s good for the brands and people think it’ll lead to impressions and lead to impact, then we move forward with it,” Parvez said. 

For example, the company recently revealed who wears the Duo mascot suit, a decision that sparked some internal debate. Despite mixed opinions, leadership allowed the social media team to make the final call on whether to unveil the person behind the mask.

While Duolingo’s bold, quirky approach may not be suitable for every brand, Kron-Hags said TikTok can work for any company, given the platform’s wide and diverse audience.

“Our brand has always been very quirky and playful, but for other brands that might be questioning whether TikTok is the right platform, I’m a believer that virtually any brand can find their niche on TikTok,” she said. 

Impressions, likes, shares and reposts all demonstrate impact 

A common misconception among company executives is that creating a viral post on social media should only take five minutes, but that’s far from the truth, according to Kron-Hags. 

Still, some of Duolingo’s most viral campaigns were put together in less than a week. The team only had six days to execute one of its most recent marketing stunts, the death of its beloved mascot. 

The company announced in early February that Duo had died. The owl was later revived after Duolingo users generated over 50 billion experience points by completing learning tasks in the app. 

Along with generating user engagement in the app, Duolingo measures the success of its social media marketing campaigns with impressions, the total number of times a piece of content is displayed on a user’s screen. Additional social media metrics, such as likes, shares and reposts, offers further insights into the content’s reach and overall impact. 

A beloved mascot certainly helps

The response to Duo’s death showed the team how deeply the character had resonated with fans, Parvez said. 

But how did it build that connection? The team developed Duo’s character, a persistent, quirky, snarky but endearing owl, by going back to the basics and incorporating narrative archetypes into their marketing strategy. 

“Lore has always been important to Duolingo, even in the app,” Parvez said. “In lore, there’s always a lover, there’s always enemies, there’s always a struggle. What’s the hero’s journey here?” 

By applying these storytelling structures, Parvez was able to create a character that people genuinely cared about. 

On the day Duolingo announced Duo’s death, the company’s social media mentions spiked by over 25,000%, with the hashtag #ripduo used more than 45,000 times, according to social media analytics company Meltwater. 

Even the singer Dua Lipa, who Duo has been obsessed with since 2021, sent her condolences to the dead owl on X, sparking another 667,000 engagement actions, whether that be likes or retweets. 

The campaign was the company’s “largest brand moment to date,” breaking many of the company’s engagement records, according to Kron-Hags. 

“When we first [launched the campaign], we didn’t think that we were going to have that kind of reaction,” Parvez said. “We thought we’d go a little viral, but not the way that it did … We actually built a really loved character.”