Lesson 17: Strategy vs. Activity
Social media done right — how Duolingo's TikTok grew to 16M followers by treating the account like a sitcom, not by posting more.
Written for Axiom Pathways.
Zaria Parvez, eight months into her first job at Duolingo, found an unused owl mascot suit and turned the brand’s dormant TikTok into a 16-million-follower account with an ~11% engagement rate — several times the platform average — by making one framing decision: treat every post as an episode of a running sitcom rather than a marketing account. The piece uses Buffer’s 2026 analysis of 52 million posts (posting volume barely moves engagement past a point) to argue the real gap between accounts that grow and accounts that don’t is identity, not frequency — and lays out four questions to define that identity: who you’re talking to, what success looks like, what your voice is, and how often is actually sustainable to post.