The New Way of Story-telling Gets Duolingo 2.9 Million Following on TikTok Within 5 Months
What is Duolingo?
You probably know that Duolingo is one of the most popular language-learning apps in the market. However, have you seen their official TikTok account @duolingo has gone viral from one video to another recently? The account grew from 50,000 in September to almost 3 million followers today, organically. As a marketing-majored content creator who is passionate about building community on social media, I feel the need to analyze why out of many brands trying to master TikTok but only Duo the owl seems to know how to work TikTok as a corporate account.
Duolingo’s brand “DNA” — the funny Owl
Unlike many other uninteresting educational apps, Duolingo’s core idea is to make learning a new language easy, fun, and interactive. The brand voice is always playful and quirky. Duolingo created a singular character, Duo the owl, with a full personality to build the brand’s consistent relationship with its audience. If you use the app, you will find that the mascot Duo is everywhere. From daily notifications to remind users to learn for just 10 minutes, to cheers with users after completing their daily learning. Duo is like that friend who pushes you and motivates you to succeed, yet sometimes can be unhinged. What’s make Duo happy is to finish your daily lesson and it can be sad when you use google translate instead of learning the language.
Carrying the brand message and translating it into TikTok Platform
Before Duolingo’s TikTok account goes viral, they focus on creating educational content of learning the language from different users and ambassadors. It is good educational content for learning a new language, but the brand’s voice and presents seem to get lost in the videos. After Duolingo’s content takes a huge pivot by implementing the voice of Duo the owl and making entertainment content, people start acknowledging the brand and following the account. Duolingo’s social team takes the core brand message of being funny and quirky and translates into TikTok, a platform mostly mends to be entertainment, which is one of the keys to its success. In most of the recent viral content of Duolingo, people find them funny, relatable, and shareable like the one below:
This viral video follows a TikTok trend using Taylor Swift’s song “Enchanted” in a scene that Duo is crying and sliding down the glass wall with the caption “When you use Google Translate instead of actually learning a language” (using Duolingo’s app). It generated 24.1 million views and 5.3 million engagements.
There are many reasons that the video is such a huge success. Relatability, entertainment, consistent voice, and brand humanization are the important keys for brand building a community. And they can all be found in this viral video. We all have used Google Translate to make it relatable. Using the song “Enchanted” with the lyrics “Please don’t be in love with someone else” makes it fun to watch. Also, the entertainment video fits perfectly with Duolingo’s funny and quirky brand image. And humanizing the Duolingo brand by showing Duo is sad when it knows the fact that people aren’t using the app. It is beneficial to bring people closer when brands humanize themselves, it is a marketing strategy that can be found with many brands like Wendy’s, Geico, etc.
Lastly, even Duo sometimes can be a pushy friend as a brand character. However, its story is pulling people to use its service. The comparison of Duolingo’s pre-viral education content with their viral entertainment content is an example of pushing and pulling storytelling. When Duolingo posts educational content on language learning, it leaves viewers no option but pushes them to learn. It might work with certain people who have interests and passions for language learning. However, everyone enjoys entertaining content, especially on Tiktok. And the way of showing Duo’s funny reactions and personality is what’s pulling people’s interest to learn more about the brand and potentially download the app.
Duolingo’s TikTok account is great learning marketing material for brands that seek to build a relationship with their audience. I look forward to seeing more brands using this story-telling strategy on social media.
