Social Listening: Duolingo

This week's blog post is going to be all about Duolingo, the brand that teaches you new languages. Duolingo has become the most popular language-learning app over recent years, with more than 500 million registered users. Duolingo is being praised by people everywhere and has a 4.7/5 star rating according to 1.3 million ratings on the Apple App Store alone. What made me interested in this brand was just how active they are on social media and replying to customers.

Duolingo’s value proposition is to offer a fun free way to learn a new language. They want to motivate people into learning a new language and have made it engaging and fun to do something that people would typically find difficult to do. When talking about the mission of this company in April of 2020, CEO: Luis von Ahn stated it was “ to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available…” Fast forward to 2022 and this mission still applies and relates to how Duolingo chooses to do business.

On Twitter, Lewis Jones expresses his appreciation for Duolingo and their free services.

Duolingo also had a string of tweets with another user about their daily streak. I would be just as excited as this user if a big brand like Duolingo responded to me.

Harrison Houde also had high praise for Duolingo in his review tweet of them.

When it comes to marketing Duolingo has a plethora of different approaches. Apart from the main social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, Duolingo also has an official TikTok account and a blog that they post one to two times a week on. They are focused on getting people to just download the app and give it a try.

Duolingo does a great job at interacting with its customers. On Instagram, they often post pictures of users along with stories about how the use of the app has changed their lives. They also like to post fan art on Fridays to keep engaged with their community. They use TikTok to connect to the younger audiences with most of their videos being skits including their mascot; Duo the green owl. They also have an interesting one-way relationship with pop icon Dua Lipa. Both fans and Duolingo themselves have attempted to connect the two but unfortunately, as I am writing this Dua Lipa has not commented. They have also earned a lot of earned media via memes. If you have the app and have notifications turned on, they will often send you messages to try and convince you to get learning again. However, these messages have been the source of many memes throughout the years as they can sometimes come off as being a little pushy and aggressive. The timing of said notifications have also become an issue as paired with other notifications the messages can be intense.

Of course, they also face the challenge of other brands such as Babbel or Rosetta Stone. The thing that sets them apart from the competitors is certainly the atmosphere of the app as they are less serious than the other brands. Duolingo tries to be fun and lighthearted learning whereas the competitors market to people that want to learn perhaps a more intense and accurate learning experience.

Duolingo has very quick and resourceful responses to customer complaints and questions. I see most of their customer service coming via Twitter as people tweet at them and they reply the same day. Take this tweet from Sencer Demir for example, he tweets at Duolingo with a question. Within the same day Duolingo responded in a clear and concise way.

Their responses are always on track and most of the complaints or questions can be answered in one to two replies. I think the way they handle these issues especially through social media and not some multiple-step online computer is something that all major companies should adopt. Even if they are automated messages in these responses, they are still responses and make it feel as if your voice was heard. If I were the brand manager, I would make the messages a little more personal such as adding the customer's name in the reply or something along those lines to make it feel more personal for the customer they are interacting with. 

I learned pretty much everything short of a new language while conducting my research on Duolingo. Coming into this post I knew that Duolingo was a fun way to learn a new language and all of the memes that have come out of it but that was about it. I did not realize how active they are with their customer base or how obsessed with Dua Lipa they were. If I were to learn a new language I would certainly use them and would refer others to do so as well. I am going to have to end this blog here because I need to go help Duo the green owl reach his soul mate in Dua Lipa. 

•  If you want to see how passionate the fans are about the two check out the comments on Dua Lipa's most recent TikTok