The Social Media Marketing Masterclass with Zaria Parvez, Head of Social at DoorDash, ex-Duolingo | Ep. 362

0:00Stuck in meetings, email loops, and comment threads trying to clarify feedback? Get unstuck with Loom. AI-powered video communication that lets you record your screen, camera, and voice to communicate fast. Try Loom today at loom.com. That's L-O-O-M dot com. Welcome to a very special episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. We recorded this one live at Marketland Festival 2025 and got such great feedback. If you've been anywhere near social media in the last few years, you know when brands talk about their dream social strategy, there's one name that always comes up, and that's Duolingo. And you hear, I want to be the Duolingo of social.

0:46You've heard it. Everyone's heard it. Well, today we have one of the masterminds behind Duolingo's viral unhinged social growth. This is someone who took a crusty owl suit from an HR closet and turned it into a cultural icon, who grew Duolingo from 50k to 16 million followers, who faked the death of a mascot and generated 1.7 billion impressions. That's three Super Bowl ads worth with basically no budget and no agency. And now she's bringing all that genius to DoorDash as the new head of social. Please welcome to the podcast, Zaria. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast.

1:36I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Welcome Zarya, welcome to Marketing Land. Thank you so much for being here.

2:02Zaria Parvez:Thank you so much for having me. I'm stoked to be here today. I'm super excited to chat because as everybody knows, and if you haven't been on social media, Duolingo is like the gold standard when people say they want to be something on social. They're like, I want to be the Duolingo in social. And we have one of the amazing masterminds behind Duolingo. So thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. So you've helped Duolingo grow from 50K to 16 million followers. What were the first levers you pulled to start that growth engine? Yeah, I think first and foremost, the story of how really like we leaned in is kind of one that I think is a little bit sweet looking back.

2:53Zaria Parvez:But I essentially started at Duolingo as our first social media hire. I was a new grad out of college. I was about a year into the job here. And TikTok just kept getting bigger and bigger. And this was right after the pandemic. So people were like hungry for video content and just seeing what other people were doing. and we wanted to make content and just figure it out like a lot of other brands. And the first content we actually started off with was like learning content, kind of what you'd expect from a language learning app, like slang words or using different creators and really investing in different faces of the brand.

3:27Zaria Parvez:And then when I came into the office, I noticed that we actually had this big crusty owl suit from HR events that was sitting in near the marketing team. And at the time I asked my role manager saying like, Hey, I have like some ideas for a TikTok. I think it might be helpful to try using our mascot as just like the character face. There's already some memes about him on Twitter. Maybe we lean into that. Let's just like see where we can go. And so I pretty much laid out like an audio. I pitched the idea with a caption on screen and she actually recorded me and then we posted it and it was something almost as simple as that.

4:06Zaria Parvez:and it took off. And then we started to see that, okay, when we use the owl, when we use these trends, we can really optimize on like these human moments that we're all sharing collectively. And it can kind of be its own force. It doesn't necessarily need to be like this extended lever of like campaigns, but it can actually be its own existence. And we as a brand can be known for our socials if we're not known for our campaigns yet. So that's kind of how the magic started. And it really grew into how do we scale day-to-day content? How do we hire a team of creators and doers? How do we find the right people to represent this brand?

4:46Zaria Parvez:And what does that look like? And how does that evolve? And so within the five years I've been here, it's gone from duo having snarky remarks to having babies with mascots to eventually dying and really just building up this whole lore around this character that just started as a crusty owl suit in our office. Yeah, I would love to go into that. I mean, it was genius idea, but it's also like the best ideas come from just, it's also crazy how good ideas come from when you're in office with all creative people and you see what's around and you just pick things up. But I wanted to go into like your framework of how you do this storytelling because it is this whole story with the mascot and how do you think about every next step like how how far out are you planning these videos because i know you're also using trends as well so the mixture of trends and planning out storylines yeah so a lot of it is like how do we ride the trend in a way that can build dueling goes lower So every piece of content you see, I say it's almost like a sitcom.

5:52Zaria Parvez:Like we're trying to tell a different story every time just for you to know one more thing about Duo. So for us, if you're 1 % better or 1 % more clear about Duo or Duolingo or a cast of characters, for us, that's a win. So we really started to create Duolingo's world. And I think that started with like figuring out like what are the principles that we want to apply to our social? and a lot of it actually isn't social strategy that we know traditionally. One big principle that I really apply with my team is the rules of improv. And how do you like, what makes like a funny bit funny? What makes something iconic?

6:31Zaria Parvez:What makes a moment that you have to roll with the punches, like make you laugh out loud and entertain you? And improv is probably the closest, I think, like match to that. We have a little bit more prep time, I think, than someone who's on stage. But we really, yes, and what we do, we try not to be blockers. Like it's really hard for an idea to get rejected at Duo. And then I think lastly, we also really commit to the bit. So if we've decided we're doing something, we're going to go 120 % in. And that's really how we built out our strategy of creating content and creating a team that like works on this day-to-day content machine.

7:11I think one thing, I mean, you've written about this too, is you do internally a writer's room. Could you say how you've set that up? Like what does a writer's room look like and how is it an ideation session for social? Yeah.

7:27Zaria Parvez:So we have our internal team, which works on the day-to-day brand. We know our brand backwards and forwards, but our writer's room are actually external writers that I've honestly just people I've admired in the industry, people I've admired doing great work. They are usually comedians. And their whole task is to essentially roast the brand, I guess, in a way where like if you were to write an SNL skit about Duolingo, what would you write and how would that look like? And we kind of focus on different topics each week. So sometimes it's duo. Sometimes it's a different world character. Sometimes it's what's going on in culture and you really have them figure out how to write about it in a way that's unique to them.

8:06Zaria Parvez:And then we always believe we can scale back, but we should let them kind of go wild and see where the limits are. And for us, I think we always walk the line, but we never cross the line. So that's what we try to think of, like, what is a space that we can navigate that is still bold and people are talking about us, but obviously, like, to our best intent, not getting canceled. So that writer's room meets weekly alongside a different internal content creation team. So there's like these two work streams working at both times. So business as usual, but also grinding and expanding on new lore and new ideas.

8:40I think that's awesome that you, I mean, sometimes as a social team, you get so caught up in what you're doing in the day to day that you don't see missing opportunities, such as bringing outside voices to just poke holes in what you're doing as a social person, because you're in it every single day. It's hard. And you need some type of outside force to sometimes push you a little bit as a social person.

9:11Zaria Parvez:Yeah, absolutely. And it just makes you think different really is what we're always trying to do is, is there something we've missed and something we can lean into? One thing I think for people out there, I know Duolingo is known as like an unhinged brand, Um, but how did you get those internal approvals and get to the stage where people are trusting you to just post and not be pigeonholed all these ideas that you have? Yeah. So I think the biggest, so the biggest thing that I had to my benefit was I was a one person social team at an engineering forest org. So that means marketing inherently wasn't, it wasn't as developed when I joined.

9:53Zaria Parvez:So they were really looking for anyone with great ideas to just push the narrative forward, which is exciting. Like, I think that's one of the big benefits of working at a startup. Since then, I feel like we've changed from startup to traditional brand. And what I say for that is like, now I've really learned what are like the one or two things that every stakeholder cares about and how do we incorporate that into the final product? And usually everybody wants the brand to be successful. It's just different ways of going about that. Um, so for me, it's a lot of, I guess, low key emotional manipulation, but like on like a more serious level, it's really understanding what their priorities are and how do we get buy-in for like why we believe an idea works.

10:38Zaria Parvez:And I think because we have a little bit more clout at Duolingo for the social stuff that we initially did, we can now use that to like sway a narrative, sway a campaign. I still want the record to be clear that there are still moments where the social team has no power, has no sway, and we have to post and resize an asset. And I think accepting that is also like part of the gig too, of like, sometimes there's battles worth fighting, and sometimes they're not worth fighting. And we've just really figured out of like, at least if we can have one campaign that's social first, a quarter that's completely from us, I'm totally okay reposting something else from another team that might not be necessarily social first, but it's about carving in that area and space that you still do have full agency over and like owning that socially through and through and then kind of using that in mixture with like what other people want you to post this is important thing a word you're saying and phrase you're saying is like social first could you describe what a social first campaign and how it comes social first because i think not many people they'll come up with a campaign it's like okay we're gonna run ads and then we're going to run an email and then social is like a part of it.

11:50But this is, you really create a campaign where social is the star and every other channel is built around it. So how do you, how does that work?

11:59Zaria Parvez:Yeah. So at Duo, I would say social is king because that's what we've been known for and where we started, which is like a really fortunate position to be in. But pretty much we use exclusively organic channels. Like that is how we distribute our content. So if we're going to distribute our content on these social channels, every campaign has to be optimized to what a social audience enjoys. So that actually means that we have really limited like paid media in the US. We have really limited out of home. We have really limited TV spots. So everything is like, OK, if it can get on TV, great. But if it isn't like, how does this it's going to live on social?

12:37Zaria Parvez:So how do we make sure the audience is understanding? What's really hard is like obviously creating your own trend and own moments. like we're probably as a brand 2 % if we're lucky of somebody's day. And so like, how do I make that 2 % relevant? Um, when it's a completely new story, which is like something we still struggle with, or like our most viral content has always been trend jacking. And now we're trying to think of like, what is a narrative that can really like shake up the internet? And I think that's where dead duo came from. I think that was a truly inherently social first moment of like the way that we unleashed it, the way that the narrative was built.

13:13There was no like here, fancy hero

13:16Zaria Parvez:campaign video. It was all like social posts that was planned out across this week of this is how it's going to go down. And all of it was created in-house. So it's about like the visual of it, understanding the craftsmanship that has to go into it and the narrative that a social audience will grab onto versus like an audience watching TV or an audience scrolling elsewhere. Since you brought it up, I was going to bring it up a little later, but you brought up Death by Duo campaign. Could you go through the initial thought process to how you built it out? And maybe a little setup for people who don't know what you did.

13:54But I think it's so cool how you wrote about it on LinkedIn, too. So everybody who wants the more in-depth, go to Zara's LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter. It's great. But yeah, for anybody who doesn't know.

14:09Zaria Parvez:Yeah. So essentially, the origins of it were, as the marketing is known for being unhinged on Duolingo, there is this push for the product and marketing to be more joint together. so it really brings people back to the app it brings people back to language learning um so one way to do that to really marry the unhingeness of our marketing but also the seriousness of our product was through that we call app icon changes so essentially every every four to five months an app our app icon changes to something new and the whole point is that the duo face changes and the hope is that we get resurrected users more people join the app because the icon looks different on their home screen.

14:53Zaria Parvez:Usually this would happen in the product world and then marketing land is marketing land and that's just how it worked. But this time we had the idea of like, what if we actually work together to like create a whole narrative around this? And so the product team said, all right, there's two icons we're testing. One with like these dead eyes and then one with like, I think duo sideways. And the way that we determine is we actually A-B test this to a small experimental group. And then if we see like an uptick in users based on one, we usually go forward with that one. And by the way, it's going to go live in a week.

15:25Zaria Parvez:So if you want to do marketing for it, you have a week to do it and you won't know like what it is until seven days before, cause we have to AB test. So they AB test and they both came out like neutral. Like they were like, it actually doesn't matter. It turns out we're getting the same type of new users from each. So marketing, what do you want to do? And for us, that's where like these X's over the eyes, like for us, like we can tell a really great social narrative about the death of Duo and how he died. And like, we think you guys should go with this one because it matches a marketing narrative that we can really push through.

15:59Zaria Parvez:And because there was no impact on the app, they were like, sure. Okay, let's do it. So we had seven days to bring it to life. And the whole concept was Duo will do anything for you doing your lesson, including faking his death. So we kind of made it into a whodunit where like every post we did for a week was like a new clue, a new hint. And we started off with this like dramatic PR statement about duo dying. And I think that's what really like spurred it. We didn't realize the impact would be as great as it was. But when it did get to that point, we're like, all right, how do we keep leaning into what the community is saying and what the community wants us to do and like iterate our content?

16:38Zaria Parvez:So we had like five pieces of content we thought we were going to make. The five pieces that we ended up going live with were completely different. And we were able to do that because we have like an onsite production assistant who helps like source props. We shot everything in office, all content creators were all hands on deck. Like there wasn't this like approval process outside of the social team. We know what our boundaries are. We know what we're not supposed to cross and we have the agency to go forward and push that. So we did that. There was no external agency involved because we didn't want so many levels of like approvals and back and forth.

17:11Zaria Parvez:And we need to get these assets up. So everyone like myself, my direct report, Kelsey, who's also a content creator and art director, Fathi, all of us pretty much worked on creating this content throughout the week. We barely slept. It was wonderful, but it was also like such an exciting time. And we just try to think of like different components. So yes, there's a social post, but then we did like a merch store component where you could actually buy a coffin for your duo plushie. And then we filmed that video. I wrote the script, Fathi filmed it, and then we posted it. And then the final thing was like this XP tracker that came from an engineer in Fathi, our art director of like, how do we actually get people to like do their lesson and show that they can revive duo.

17:51Zaria Parvez:So we'll have countries like compete against each other and slowly as they do their lesson, their XP will increase and they can see which country revive duo. So it kind of became this 360 campaign within seven days because we had full agency to just keep pushing the envelope to really go with our idea and commit to the bit and just keep yes anding. And so that kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier of like really following the tenets of improv like we're constantly on our feet constantly figuring out how to pivot and being absolutely okay with like scratching ideas and like having new ideas come up and executing on those I think one thing you also I think is crazy to mention is that this campaign did 1.7 billion impressions which is basically three Super Bowl ads which I think is crazy to think about and as you could see there's like not many there's not an agency of all there's nothing so like the budget was so low to put out something that was so well done that got more view than i would say like 99 of content out there which is crazy yeah it was it was wild but i think honestly like i always say fear one of my actually mentors told me this that fear is incredibly expensive and it's something i always have in the back of my mind where a lot of this was happened and was allowed because there was agency in the social team to be our own approvers and to just go with an idea and run with it.

19:13Zaria Parvez:And I think when brands have these, this fear, agencies have this fear, it just prevents the potential of getting that 1.7 billion impressions or getting that impact because we're so scared of like what will happen or what won't happen. And I think we kind of lose sight of like, we should just try it and see what happens versus trying to anticipate the bad before it even happens. Campaigns get stuck, 17 strategy drafts, feedback in multiple channels, approvals in email thread limbo. Enter Loom, the AI-powered video tool to get your team aligned and your campaign unstuck. Loom records your screen, camera, and voice to share video messages async so you can get the clarity to move forward.

19:57Fewer bottlenecks, faster launches, smarter campaigns. Go to loom.com. That's L-O-O-M dot com. I also want to go into something. I mean, you talk about that you have a three to five posts a week cadence. And what is your process of deciding what gets posed through? Because I know you recently just started doing YouTube shorts really well. You've always done TikTok really well, now IG. So what does that cadence look like? So people could know like, okay, I need to post three to five posts a week. What does that look like?

20:41Zaria Parvez:Yeah. So we really try to like balance our feed. If you're a Duolingo fan, you probably know when we first started, it was like a lot of unhinged stuff. So now we're trying to work on this, kind of on the strategy that we've coined as push and pull. so the push content is like push messaging so content that you kind of expect like learn a language we've launched this new course so on and so forth using our animation and our design studio skills and then pull is more of that viral punchy stuff so we try to have about two posts of pull and two posts of push a week um and then sometimes pull tends to go a little bit higher just based off of like virality um but having that healthy balance kind of allows us to bring in this whole idea of candy to the medicine where like the candy is that pull content, that viral punchy stuff that's bringing you in.

21:32Zaria Parvez:And then the medicine is that push. It's that here's how you can use this language. Here's a word in a language that you probably don't know. Here's a new course we launched. And it allows us to have kind of this holistic, healthy brand where we understand trend, but we also understand that you need us to prove language efficacy and that we know how to teach a language. So that content is also there for you. We're just trying to bring you to our page and bring you to our app just so you can see that and bring you in a fun way. You really, I mean, Duolingo, social, your whole team, you and your whole team are really good at finding out trends.

22:06So what are like, how are you so up to date on trends? What are you using to make sure that you hit those trends? Because I've seen multiple, just one line posts, trend jacking something on Twitter, for example, like makes you go viral. So how are you staying and when do you pick those moments to do those things?

22:27Zaria Parvez:I think the truth of the matter is we're not using any tools, but we are all severely chronically online. And the way that I've hired my social team is like, yes, there's strategy there, but I would say the majority of us are creators. We are content creators. We know how to pick up a trend, how to make the video relevant, and how to go with this Duolingo owl strategy and push it forward. And I think, I think honestly, it's going to be a challenge, right? Like when, you know, if you don't have an owl, how does that look like? If you don't have a character, what does that look like? So yes, we're just online a lot.

23:02Zaria Parvez:And there's a lot of back and forth of like, should we use this trend? Should we not use this trend? Usually what allows us what we usually say yes to a trend if like, we kind of have this thing where it's like this Venn diagram where if we can mention the character, product and mission in some kind of way, that's usually like the golden trifecta for us that does really well. So our mission is to make education accessible. We don't necessarily say that directly in our content, but if it can be about that in some sense of the word, awesome character, usually that means like obviously duo, a world character and a trend.

23:37Zaria Parvez:And then the product, if there's a way, sorry, excuse me, if there's a way for it to be about language learning, that's really going to elevate our kind of like our trend jacking above just being part of a trend. It's really about us being the right person to talk about that trend. So those are the moments you usually see that do really well. Or if it's a trend that no brand really wants to dive into, then we kind of dive into it. So like, I think Adam Levine had these like insane text messages or Instagram DMs a long time ago about a girl's body being insane. And we actually put Duo's body there instead.

24:12Zaria Parvez:And I think the irony of it being like a fluffy cartoon bird made that okay for the world to process and they really loved it. But a lot of brands didn't jump there. So it's like finding spaces where there's loose balls and how do we chase those loose balls that people aren't paying attention to? Yeah. I think what you also said too, is if you can fit the, at least most of the golden trifecta and, and with that, Adam Levine having a, a character helped you, but at least like if you can fit in that golden trifecta it works if it doesn't then you're probably gonna not jump on that campaign um which is which is cool that you said like guardrails that hey if it fits into this these guardrails let's do it if it doesn't um let's um shy away from it yeah for sure um i want to know like the lessons you've learned like what what is different between posting on TikTok versus Instagram versus YouTube shorts?

25:19Like what are some lessons you've learned that are like the same and what are different on all three of those channels?