Even though Duolingo memes have been flowing around the internet for years now, Duo's recent redesign, which gave the mascot a more intense and assertive personality, has led to an even greater influx of humorous content and creative posts from users.
"As our TikTok was starting to take off, our social media, community content, and campaigns [were still] pretty separate," says the company's senior global social media manager Zaria Parvez.
"It took about a year to start making our campaigns social-first and our mantra for 2023 has been about shifting our whole marketing strategy to being social-first."
"Our first success wasn't actually creating video content ... it was from commenting on other people’s videos," Parvez adds. "Those comments ended up becoming almost like the new push notification for Duolingo. Everyone started seeing Duo pop up everywhere."
People really liked it, so their strategy was to work backward from that. "It was honestly all very scrappy at the start – just taking moments of inspiration from knowing the platform, being social-first, and existing in culture. It's that mentality which really built these videos and 'CAP,' our first viral hit, happened pretty soon after that."
Parvez says that nobody can plan virality, but you can plan a mentality that prioritizes it. "Our openness to being scrappy and experimenting [is] what has set us apart."
"Everyone has the mindset [that] if we want to go viral, we have to make it happen fast. That's the key to consistency, setting a mentality, and becoming mission-driven," she notes.
The social media manager says there was some initial pushback within the company here and there from people who weren't completely onboard with the new voice. After all, it was pretty much a new grad coming in and saying, "Hey, this is exactly how we're changing and revolutionizing everything" to someone who has been working in the industry for over a decade. But she says people became receptive as they started to see the impact of it.
