The master plan behind Duolingo's TikTok fame

Last week we focused on the Revolve’s perfect “It girl” marketing strategy. This week we will be looking at a strategy on the opposite end of the spectrum taken by the #1 educational language app, Duolingo! Now Duolingo is not just number one language app because of the learning content of the app, its branding strategy on TikTok starting during mid 2021 is part of the reason the app climbed the charts so quickly.

So how did Duolingo accumulate 4.8M million and 95.9 million likes over approximately a year? By creating a personal brand on TikTok! Duolingo started making content by posting informal educational videos. They would exemplify different words and their meanings in different languages in scenarios, but they were not receiving the engagement desired. Therefore, they tried using comedic relief in their videos along with mascot Duo the Owl. This is the type of content that created viral engagement and what Duolingo has stuck with since. They not only make consistent content and keep up with ongoing trends, but also interact very frequently with their audience by replying to their comments and commenting on other content creator’s videos. This social media plan has created an abundance of primary, secondary, and tertiary shares that have grown the brand to the extent it is at today and has created a comedic, entertaining, and realistic personal brand for Duolingo on TikTok.

Duolingo as a company has had the same goal since it’s public launch in 2012: to create approachable and affordable ways to educate customers on languages. Although this is the goal, Tik Tok users would not gravitate towards content only focused on education and advertisement of the app. Brand’s must choose one of these categories for creating appealing video content: authentic, entertaining, Intimate, and unusual. This requires trial and error from the brand to find which category works best for engagement with their content. Duolingo has found the best results using the entertainment method; therefore, their priority with their content is entertaining the consumer while the underlying goal is to create brand awareness, interaction, and educate consumers.

I knew that I wanted to research Duolingo’s social media strategy since I am aware of their prominent presence on TikTok, and it shows the drastic difference in social media personal brands that can be inhabited compared to last week’s blog on Revolve. While researching, I learned that Duolingo heavily uses a specific social media strategy recommended by the TikTok company itself for content creators; the method is called the Flicker, Flash, Flare Framework. Flicker means reactive content like participating in trends. These are posts that should be made frequently to keep up to date due to the fast-paced recycling of trends on TikTok. This content should be easy to produce since the framework of the post is made by the trend itself, the content is just molded to match the relevance of the brand. Flash is proactive content which is consistent formatting content that is the baseline of the brand’s content.

For Duolingo, this is the comedic relief brand content that they have scheduled to post every week. This content should be produced with the same quality and consistency every week so that it can be easily recognized by consumers. Lastly, Flare is considered interactive content like large scale branding campaigns. These kinds of campaigns should on happen 1 to 3 times a year and can be things like hashtag challenges or personalized effects that are used on the app. Once Duolingo found their target audience and personal brand, they used this content framework to create the continuously growing audience they have today and what other brands use now as the branding strategy for their own pages.

Now if you will excuse me… I’m going to go watch some Duolingo TikToks.

Reference: How Duolingo Created a Formula for Success on TikTok | Sprout Social.