Zaria Parvez was 23 years old and eight months into her first job when she saw an unused green mascot suit shaped like an owl sitting in Duolingo’s office. She looked at her manager and asked a single question: could she wear that suit to make TikTok videos?
At the time, TikTok was blowing up. People Parvez knew were making careers off of viral content practically overnight. So she asked. And her manager said yes.
She roped a coworker into the mascot suit, filmed a five-minute video improvised around a trending topic, and posted it to Duolingo’s TikTok account. Until then, the company hadn’t treated TikTok like serious social media: the account had 50,000 followers and hadn’t been used regularly.
Contrary to expectation, TikTok users loved it. The account hit one million followers in a month.
As of May 2025, Parvez has grown that account to 16 million followers, 850 million organic views, and 143 individual videos that have reached over one million views apiece. She did it while spending “essentially zero dollars on paid promotion,” according to her newsletter ( zariaparvez.substack.com ). Duolingo now boasts an engagement rate around 11% on TikTok (Versus the platform average of ~2–3% among most brands, according to Visibrain’s 2025 data), and at its peak held a follower count higher than Disney, Apple, and Nike on the platform.
It was a quantum leap. But how did Parvez do it?
She didn’t post more.
Posting has never been the answer to TikTok virality, or social media success, in general.
Consider This: posting more never helped anyone hit a number because the problem was never the number of posts they had. The problem was the frame.
The Decision That Made All Others Easy
Here’s what Parvez did instead: she decided TikTok was going to operate as a sitcom.
“Everything we put out there is an episode,” Parvez told 20VC in an interview . The mascot suit was a character with goals and flaws. The account had storylines. Posts would reference each other and build on months of previous content.
The frame — sitcom, versus “brand account” — naturally set rules for every other decision Parvez made going forward. What would the tone be? Comedy, like a sitcom. What should they post? What would progress the storyline? What should they avoid? Breaking the fourth wall and reminding people they’re watching a business.
Strategy vs. Activity
The realization that deciding who you are matters more than deciding what to post next is what every high-performing social account has in common with every low-performing social account. The difference between the two? High performers recognize that realizing who you are is strategy. Posting without that frame is just…activity.
Let’s look at the data.
Does Posting More Really Help?
The research into post frequency has always led to the same conclusion, whether it’s Buffer’s 2026 State of Social Media Engagement report (which looked at 52 million-plus posts across Reddit, TikTok, Twitter/X, Instagram, and LinkedIn) or studies from academics like Carnegie Mellon data science professor Kirk Borne.
Buffer found that accounts which failed to post in a given week saw noticeable deficits to their baseline growth. Yet posting more didn’t proportionally increase engagement — accounts that doubled their output didn’t necessarily grow twice as much. Meanwhile, Bigeye analyzed Buffer’s historic 2024–2025 data to discover that reducing posting volume by 15% actually hurt total engagement by a mere 0.5%.
HubSpot came to similar conclusions in its research: for small businesses, posting two to five times per week consistently outperforms posting once a day for total engagement.
The trend is clear across studies: while regularly posting matters, dumping as many posts as possible into your feed does not. If you want a video strategy to succeed, posting more videos will make it worse, not better.
How to Actually Build a Strategy
Posting more videos won’t help you build your strategy, but these five questions will:
Who are you talking to?
This is the secret to Duolingo’s success. Instead of saying “our TikTok audience is ‘Millennials who want to learn Spanish,’” Parvez defined her audience by a specific person. That persona — a Gen Zer who wanted to be entertained, not taught — informed her decisions on where and how to post.
Duolingo could’ve tried to post their existing content on TikTok, but that wouldn’t have worked. By asking where their target audience hangs out online first, they ended up on TikTok. Always let your ideal customer lead you to the platform, instead of the reverse.
A good strategy defines what success looks like on a per-post basis. Is it a follow? A share? Comment? Click? Saved post? You can’t begin to track your performance until you define what you’re trying to achieve.
Duolingo’s TikTok profile stood out by having a singular voice. This owl has opinions, and they’ll tell you about them. Your brand can do the same by defining the one characteristic — funny, political, silly, high-information — that applies to every post.
Your answer to this question is how often you should post. Your sweet spot is probably not daily, but it also probably shouldn’t be monthly. Figure out how often you can post with that same level of intention, and stick to it.
Posting doesn’t help you build a strategy. But answering these questions will. Once you do, you’ll understand why Parvez didn’t have to post more to grow TikTok by 16 million followers. She just had to show up.
