Zaria Parvez's favorite days are TikTok filming days.
As a social media coordinator at Pittsburgh-based Duolingo Inc. (NASDAQ: DUOL), a freemium educational platform primarily focused on language learning, Parvez is responsible for running the team behind the company's account on TikTok — a social networking service owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd. that primarily features short-form videos created by its users.
Parvez is also the one responsible for the account's recent explosive and viral success, which has generated more than 73 million views across the 25 videos it has posted over the course of the past month.
It's the first job 23-year-old Parvez has had since graduating from the University of Oregon in the spring of 2020, formally joining Duolingo in June of last year. As a user of the video-based platform well before taking on the job, Parvez felt confident in knowing what makes for a successful video on TikTok after watching so many of them herself. Because of that, she also saw an opportunity for Duolingo to better tap into the benefits the TikTok platform can offer to those who know how to use it best.
"A big part of Duolingo is that we make language learning fun, and I think that quality specifically was such an awesome opportunity to link to TikTok because TikTok is meant for entertainment, it's meant for people to have fun, brands are there to entertain, they're not just there to sell — brands that try selling things don't really tend to resonate, but if they entertain, people love it," Parvez said. "We kind of saw this natural link where we have this whole idea that language learning is fun, why don't we strategically use a platform that's meant for fun to push that idea."
The account, however, didn't initially start out with that plan.
Duolingo in February partnered with ByteDance to create different videos about language learning from multi-lingual users on the platform, but it only saw varied performance across the dozen or so of these types of videos that it produced over the following months. It was also during this time that the company was still maintaining remote staffing operations. To supply content for the account, it took in videos from around the world for an end product that had more of a professional-like production quality to it instead of one that looks like it was produced from a smart phone. It turns out, the videos that are most successful on TikTok are almost exclusively ones that are produced the latter of these two ways and not the former.
But then Duolingo's East Liberty offices reopened in September and everything changed. The reunification of its staff led to the eventual experimentation of new ways to use the account to interact with its then-paltry 50,000 followers. It also added two key new ingredients; incorporating a full-body costume of Duo, the company's green owl mascot, into the videos and using popular audio trends, like songs or sound effects, that other viral videos were using but with a Duolingo-twist applied to them.
The company posted the first video marking the new efforts on Sept. 30. It featured an employee sitting in a chair as the camera panned over to show a looming Duo standing on a nearby table while playing the popular "live, laugh, love" audio trend. An on-screen video caption stated, "when you're just tryna do your work without being terrorized by an owl," the text itself serving as a reference to an older meme that often depicted Duo as threatening users who did not complete their daily language learning lesson on the Duolingo platform.
"We posted it and all of a sudden it had so much success, people were just super excited about it," Parvez said. "I think that trend wasn't too risky at that point, so we kept creating videos and pushing the limits."
Doing so turned out to be a winning strategy as the video so far has obtained more than 3.2 million views and over 695,000 likes on TikTok. It was also the first of many viral videos to come.
A week later, Duolingo posted another video featuring the Duo costume and using an audio trend that singingly spells out the word "cap" — which is often used in TikTok parlance to insinuate that someone is telling a lie — with an on-screen caption of "I'm going to do my Spanish lesson today," a tongue-in-cheek reference alluding to a user who tells themselves that they'll complete a daily lesson on Duolingo's platform only to end up not doing it in the end.
It's now the most-viewed video on the account so far with more than 9.5 million plays and 1.6 million likes. Since posting it, Parvez said Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn can frequently be heard singing the song to himself throughout the company's offices or referencing it in emails and Slack messages.
In total, the company's account has earned almost 100 million views and 15 million likes in the nine months that it has been running, but almost all of that is a direct result of the efforts made since the end of September. On Nov. 4, it officially passed the 1 million follower milestone, a 1,900% increase in just over a month from the 50,000 followers it had 30 days before.
And while the viral videos have been fun to make, the company's executive team currently doesn't have any set objective for the account other than allowing it to continue doing what it has been doing thus far — posting engaging videos that ultimately spread the message that at its core, language learning can be fun for all.
"At this stage, it's really just about entertaining, having fun, building up the brand," Michaela Kron, U.S. marketing lead at Duolingo, said. "We don't care so much about user acquisition. If we get it, that's great from TikTok. We have other user acquisition channels that we obviously prioritize. TikTok is one of those places, it's like a playground for us at this point where we can have fun, test and learn, see what works and kind of build on that."
Kron said it's too soon to share any specific numbers just yet in terms of how many users have joined the platform specifically because of the viral TikTok videos. However, she said there's been a noticeable uptick of respondents in user acquisition surveys who have said they joined the platform because of Duolingo's social media presence.
But the account's success isn't just translating to new users, it's also bringing in new hires. Kron said that some prospective employees are putting references to Duolingo's TikTok account on their job applications and indicating they want to work in an environment where such type of work isn't just possible, but encouraged — a message coming from senior leadership directly.
In a recent weekly companywide email where von Ahn usually shares messages about topics that are on his mind or goals he'd like Duolingo to accomplish over the coming days and weeks, the CEO instead wrote a few brief sentences asking the nearly 500 employees at the company to check out its TikTok account if they haven't done so already.
"TikTok has been an ideal way for us to lean into our fun, quirky, and playful brand personality, while also authentically connecting with new audiences, especially Gen Z," Cammie Dunaway, Duolingo's chief marketing officer, said in an email statement. "It's been incredible to see all of the team's efforts and success with the platform!"
As for Parvez, it's a pretty good first job to have, but it's also one that has her feeling reflective of the company's culture more broadly, as well as considering the risk any company takes on when hiring younger talent.
"It's really surreal to have this be my job and to sit here and be like, guys, I get to do something I absolutely love and see the impact and also be celebrated and appreciated for that, and I think that speaks to Duolingo as a company, but also just the acceptance of diversity of thought because … well I'm not sure if (other companies) would be as open or receptive to, 'hey, this is what I'm thinking, and this is why it will work and here's why' and having them saying, ok, go for it," Parvez said. "Having that freedom to do so has been really awesome."
