THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 14th Annual Shorty Awards

Duolingo TikTok Channel

Winner in TikTok Presence

Finalist in Community Management

Bronze Honor in Takeovers

Audience Honor in TikTok Presence

Objectives

At the very center of Duolingo's TikTok strategy is the goal of entertaining, versus promoting or marketing our product. We endeavor to create fun, quirky, and, yes, "unhinged" content that resonates with and engages the TikTok user base. Duolingo's overall brand is fun and quirky, and we know that the key to helping people learn a new language is making it a fun experience. With that in mind, we want that sense of fun to show up wherever our brand is, whether it's in the Duolingo app itself or on TikTok. 

Strategy and Execution

Duolingo's TikTok channel launched in early 2021 mainly with language-related content developed in partnership with external creators. Then in September 2021, after a hiatus of a few months, we started creating and posting content with much greater consistency and an entirely new "test-and-learn" approach to the platform. Specifically, we incorporated a few key elements that helped the Duolingo TikTok account become one of the most popular brand accounts on the platform:

  1. In virtually all of our videos, we have integrated the giant mascot costume of Duo the Owl and created Duo as a central character across the videos
  2. We've used trending audio vs. original audio to add our take on various TikTok trends and memes and become part of the conversation 
  3. We have further grown Duolingo's channel by commenting on other creators' and brands' videos in order to reach different audiences, including various TikTok subcultures 

Overall, we think about TikTok very differently from other social channels and have created all of our content with this in mind in order to authentically connect and engage with the audiences across TikTok.

Results

Since September 2021, our efforts have been greatly paying off:

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Duolingo

Link

Entry Credits