Who is Behind the Account???
By: Alyssa Serbak, Duquesne University
Duolingo has been dominating the Tik-Tok field since the day they joined the app. With all of the rising trends, dances, and songs, Duolingo and its well-known Owl mascot have been taking over the for you page, and recently, doing collaborations.
About Duolingo
Duolingo was created ten years ago in 2012 by Luis Von Ahn. Luis is a native Guatemalan from Central America who came to the United States in 1996 to pursue a math degree at Duke University. After Duke, Luis studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, right down the road from us in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Although Duolingo was not Luis first success, Luis created the world’s most popular language learning app, which has taught more than 300 million users around the globe (bbc.com).
Duolingo on Tik-Tok
Duolingo joined the world renown app, Tik-Tok, in February of 2021. Nearly eight months later, Duolingo was taking over the app by obtaining over 692.5 thousand followers and had around 7.7 million likes on their content. As of now in April of 2022, Duolingo has 4.1 million followers and over 77 million likes on their content. Duolingo has come so far over the years to even collaborating with another famous mascot, Scrub Daddy. In this recent collaboration on April 18th, 2022, between Duolingo and Scrub Daddy, it shows the two mascots coming together to make funny content using the name “DuoDaddy”, a play on words mixing the name Scrub Daddy and Duolingo.
Who Runs This Show???
With all of the content blowing up, what the fans want to know is not only who is behind the suit, but who is behind the phone?! Obviously, whoever is behind the phone understands the local culture and speaks the language (LOL), they engage directly with followers to feel like a connectable brand, their content is based off of trends but takes their own spin to it, they are able to keep a brand identity while being more relaxed to fit the trends of younger audiences, and their videos are immediately recognized as Duolingo content. Duolingo has given Duo the owl his own personality at this point besides being just a person behind the suit. And to finally answer the question, Parvez and her manager, Michaela Kron are in charge of the Duolingo Tik-tok account, creating all the content you love to see.
“Learning Language can be fun for all”
After blowing up on Tik-Tok, Duolingo has decided to keep doing what they have been doing, following trends and being the funny image of a company meaning so much more. If Duo the owl can keep producing fun content to target trends, it can show to the younger crowd using tiktok that they can learn a language for fun too, if you can see duo the owl having fun, so can you! Not only is the content meant to engage the younger audiences to use Duolingo to learn a language, but it is also meant to appeal to newer ages of audiences and build up the brand.
Tik-Tok as a form of Advertising
Tik-Tok has been taking over other apps, in fact Tik-Tok can be held up close to Microsoft and other big companies for being the most popular engines. Advertising on Tik-Tok can be as easy as you make it to be. With their algorithm, you can post videos for no cost and reach millions of people...FOR FREE! You can also pay to put your content out there more as well, starting as low as running 5-60 second videos for as much or as little money as you want to spend. As long as you follow the trends like Duolingo does, you can advertise for no cost at all and be even more affective as most paid ads. Crazy how social media can be so easy yet so hard to use!
Check out these other articles on Duolingo and their celebrity Tik-Tok account