Social Listening: Duolingo Bird is Dead!

Duolingo is a popular app used to teach people a new language of choice. If you take a look at their social media posts, they are very active and interesting. Their mascot the “Duolingo bird” has become very popular over time. I personally have used Duolingo for school and even just on my own time and each time I have been pretty impressed in how their system is set up. They have Instagram, TikTok and. Facebook, although I’ve only stumbled across their TikTok mostly, which has about 17 million followers. They post fairly often and each video more creative than the next. The way they respond to their followers is very different than other companies I see. I often see them respond in sarcastic manners, or as if they are texting a friend of theirs.

I was scrolling on TikTok one day and I came across this video of a random girl, it was just a picture of her with the words, “DUOLINGO BIRD IS DEAD?!” And as I opened the comments of that video, I see many people had seen this TikTok Duolingo had posted, so of course I had to also. I made my way to their TikTok page, and there it was, a video of two other characters carrying a casket with Duo inside with the caption, “BREAKING NEWS: Update regarding Duo’s death. More details to follow.” Curious, I opened the comments of that video to find many other verified companies

sending their condolences, feeding into the bit Duolingo had put on. I felt that this was a pretty smart marketing idea because, it got me to click on their page, and I am sure it got others to as well. Whether the video came up on someone’s for you page, saw the same random video a girl made, or saw it in the news, it was an attention grabber, humorous, and formed a meme, which we all know when something becomes a meme, it can really take off. Since then, Duolingo has played into the death of their bird mascot and continued to make jokes and other engaging ways so that people stay interested and not bored.

After the death of the Duolingo bird, their following TikTok’s have all been related to the travesty, and people continued to love it. People soften made jokes like “now I won’t have to do my lesson” or “ he died because you guys didn’t do your lesson for the day.” I haven’t seen many people saying anything bad about this happening, to me it seemed like everyone thought it was either funny and made memes out of it. Overall, I found it to be a very smart way to get people more engaged in this company, specifically their younger audiences. Which if you were to look more into their social media pages, especially TikTok, the humor used in their videos is very much appealing to Gen Z. I find it to be pretty fun and interesting. I actually highly suggest everyone take a look at their page because they are very fun to watch.

Article Used: https://tnj.com/duolingo-owl-death/

Duolingo’s Tikok: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo?lang=en