Duolingo takes on YouTube Shorts & UGC

Duolingo was just named Ad Age's Marketer of the Year! Out of 50 people on marketing, there's only 3 FTE on the social team - 2 of which are responsible for day to day content ( Kelsey Dempsey and myself). Karen Buchanan will be starting next year and I can't wait to have her on our team!

Although the social team is a very small fraction of all our marketing team, I thought it would be fun to share in more detail how social has contributed to being named Marketer of the Year. And, particularly, how we've started to focus on User Generated Content & YouTube Shorts.

When I started as Duolingo's first full time social media hire back in 2020, our goals were pretty simple: establish a brand voice and presence on social that contends with top marketers.

We made some pretty standard social posts, but nothing that would win awards. However, I truly believe to get where we are today, we had to have a period of trial and error and getting the not-so-good ideas out of our system. This helped us realize - with data - what our audience wanted from us.

Since then, we launched our TikTok and have gained over 13M followers by focusing on trend-based content and doubling down on speed. We ship about 3-5 videos a week, across platforms. Day to day content is our bread and butter that is fast, reactive and doesn't revolve around a marketing campaign.

But what happens when people get used to our content? How do we keep raising the bar on social? How do we stand out in a sea of brands who are finally catching on to what works?

Like many other brands, we noticed our TikTok engagement wasn't as high as it used to be. People were expecting the bird to be unhinged. It wasn't as surprising. So we went back to the drawing board to figure out how we can make day to day content more relevant to a wider array of people.

We focused on:

1) How do we incorporate our product more? Now that we've gained general awareness of who Duo is on social, how do we start showcasing our product in an entertaining way?

2) Third party impressions about Duolingo are huge - are there moments or things we can do to inspire others to post about us?

3) How do we crack a new platform with high engagement like YouTube Shorts?

How do we incorporate our product more? Now that we've gained general awareness of who Duo is on social, how do we start showcasing our product in an entertaining way?

One of the best parts about working on Duolingo's social team is the product is inherently social-first and we take steps every day to make shareable moments in the app.

Everybody at Duolingo (far before I even started working here) worked toward making learning a language more fun and gamified. These characteristics such as the streak, push notifications, world characters and silly sentences are inherently social-first.

We figured out touch points to focus on in the app that could be used to jump into the cultural zeitgest. Such as: our lesson end screen, our app loading page, and our app icon.

Our design team made templates of these parts of the app for the social team. So, even if we can't officially have these meme-able moments always present in our product, we can cosplay like we do. And the social buzz is the same.

For example, with our newest feature Video Call with Lily there's an internal rig where we can get our World Character, Lily, to say anything. When Wicked released, we changed our lesson end screen (using the template provided by our design team) to read: "hold space for defying gravity".

Third party impressions about Duolingo are huge - are there moments or things we can do to inspire others to post about us?

One of the most remarkable insights we've come across is that with building so much brand love around Duo the Owl on social, people want to create their own videos about Duo to increase their own engagement. Instead of pouring $$ into a brand campaign, we wanted to find a way to use that $$ to get people to post about Duo organically.

The social team had the idea of hijacking Charli XCX's opening night of the BRAT tour. We approached the activation with three underutilized factors of TikTok in mind. TikTok as the new search engine leading to third party impressions, TikTok Shop integration, and creator-first endorsement.?

The opening night of the BRAT tour was a ripe opportunity for us to play with these features while working with Duolingo’s solidified TikTok-first model. The idea: hype up super fans with the Owl Suit in the parking lot while they waited in line to enter, and then do a surprise "Duolingo mask" activation (with a mask that’s on TikTok shop) during two songs, "Apple" and "Talk Talk" as a flash mob.? Apple, because it was arguably the biggest song of the summer, so we knew that it would be a highly-engaged and highly-filmed moment. And Talk Talk because it was a natural brand fit with the line “talk to me in French, talk to me in Spanish.” And as fate would have it, Charli released a remix of that track right before her concert featuring none other than…Dua Lipa - Duo’s love interest.?

The idea was so successful, that we got UGC from Charli XCX herself - she called Duolingo out from the stage.

How do we crack a new platform with high engagement like YouTube Shorts?

We started our TikTok in September of 2021 when TikTok hit 1B monthly active users. At the time, very few brands were on the platform. And, no brand was unhinged. We decided to accept our fate and address the memes about Duolingo once and for all. And, well the rest is history.

But, now that more brands are taking over TikTok, we wanted to stay ahead of the game. As of today, there aren't many brands on YouTube shorts that are standouts. Just as Wendy's is known for Twitter, we want to be known for YouTube.

YouTube Shorts is a great playing field for non-trend dependent content and it has a super long shelf life. The feed will give you multiple videos that are up to 1 year old.

So far we've found that Shorts is ideal for telling our own brand narrative and keeps people engaged. We posted a Webtoon about Duo with voice actors that got 1M+ views, our take on what Duolingo Math can help with and some lore about Lily & Zari.

The most distinct thing about YouTube shorts is that a vast variety of content can go viral. The content I shared above doesn't even feature our mascot suit - which was so vital to going viral on TikTok.

Having a new channel to tinker with has allowed us to build the breadth of content we create and not just have a one and done unhinged social strategy. Our content can vary and still go viral with the help of YouTube Shorts.

Since doubling down on YouTube Shorts and focusing on creating different types of content for the platform, we've grown our channel by 600%. Last year our YouTube Shorts were at 65M views in Q3, and this year it's at 392M views!

Although there are many factors that made Duolingo Ad Age's Marketer of the Year, the social team has continually worked to experiment, evolve and test the limits of our brand. We're excited to have contributed even a small fraction to the overall team's success!