Ryanair is regarded as the king of branding on Tik Tok thanks to their social commentary and mocking attitude. Their following of 2 million followers towers over every other airline who can’t seem to get over 300,000 followers. Even their engagement rate is leagues above everyone else’s.
Ryanairs output on Tik Tok is a great case study for how you can develop a brand that people love. Their comedic style not only gets them engagement on social media but also subtly increases their sales! They’re fully aware of this which is why you’ll see the funniest content from them just before their peak times.
It doesn’t matter what your business is or what you offer, you can easily create a brand just like Ryanairs. This approach will work primarily for Tik Tok but can also be applied to all of your social media efforts.
What Makes Ryanair Unique?
Ryanairs social media strategy is to be a creator first and a business second. Their focus is on creating engaging content as if they were a solo creator and having fun with their account. This is unlike every other airline who are focused on business in every post. Their posts will feature the amazing locations they go to, their comforting flight experience, or even just fascinate on their uniform (Virgin Atlantic’s Tik Tok is weird).
Ryanairs marketing strategy is different because they’re essentially a meme page. They’re not trying to sell you anything, they’re just trying to make you laugh through social commentary, some clever jokes, and through acting unprofessionally. Ryanair also understands what makes a meme funny and how to set up a joke which leads to their content being genuinely hilarious. People engage with content that effects them and comedy is the most effective type of social media content for getting engagement which is why Ryanair has gone for a comedy first approach.
How to Create Content for Tik Tok Like Ryanair
The great thing about Ryanairs social media strategy is that it can be studied and then copied for your own marketing. They use a few different methods to always stay up to date whilst still being hilarious and having that no cares vibe. All of these methods are basic and can be used for almost any brand.
How Ryanair Masters Social Commentary
Ryanairs marketing is as famous as it is because they’re masters of social commentary. They input on current affairs which keeps them consistently relevant but always approach the topic as a joke. This method enables them to always be at the forefront of trending templates which not only keeps their content from becoming stale but also allows them to touch on the same topics several times from different angles.
Incorporating Ryanairs social media strategies into your own is surprisingly easy. You’ve just got to take an experience or current event and then make a joke about it or within that context. This does require knowledge on how memes and jokes work but luckily I go over that in the articles pictured below.
How to Leverage Social Commentary for your Brand
You’ll first want to find out what’s trending, both topic wise and template/effects wise, and then begin thinking of content using that. This is as easy as just looking through Tik Tok for 30 minutes and noting down what’s being used and talked about. If you see someone using a particular template then there will usually be a hashtag or way to see every other post that’s used that template so look through there to get several ideas. Sounds, templates, and themes are what you’re looking for here.
Then, you’ve got to make a funny joke. Ryanair focuses on the experience of flying, usually with themselves, and use that as the basis of their jokes. People engage with content that effects them and almost everyone will have some experience of flying so seeing content that talks about flying can have an affect on them. You should aim to have at least 1 experience or topic that you’re basing each piece of content on, and this should be something that appeals to your customers or is a common experience. For example, everyone has to go to work so you could make videos based on random issues that you’d have on a daily basis such as someone stealing your lunch from the fridge. You can then use a template as the means to tell the joke.
Finally, you’ve got to have a voice and a “side” on most topics. The topic of charging customers for the toilets is brought up in many of Ryanairs Tik Toks and it’s always approached from a greedy businessman or a HR statement perspective. This not only makes a joke on a controversial trending topic but also makes customers more open to the idea since they’re associating the controversy with comedy.
How to Find and Make the Most out of Tik Tok Trends
Ryanairs social media strategy requires them to always be up to date with the latest trends and topics which can be a full time job in its own. They’ll also often be 1 of the first accounts to start using a trend or discussing a topic which put’s them at the forefront of that wave. This can take a lot of effort to achieve however there are a few strategies for how to get on top of trends.
For templates, CapCut seems to be the most popular option for finding new and exciting ideas. CapCut is another video editing app from Tik Toks parent company and offers presents, templates, and sounds that can be used for various videos. On Tik Tok, a random template will often go viral and then gets adopted by everyone else. With this in mind, your approach should be to either use these templates as they’re just beginning to trend or to use a random template and hope it goes viral. Another method would be to use a template and make the funniest video from it, something which I go over how to do in What Makes a Meme Hilarious.
On the social front, Ryanair will often use trending shows to tell their jokes. Think of shows like Stranger Things or Wednesday, which Ryanair then bases many of their videos on. The idea here is that people would have seen these famous shows and then will be effected when they see Ryanair using them for their jokes. In most cases, this approach works because Tik Tok will always give a push to trending topics so Ryanairs videos will always be helped out by the algorithm.
Keeping up to date with the latest shows can be time consuming however, depending on who you are, you can often incorporate time to watch these shows into your day. Social media will often tell you what shows are trending which tells you what shows you need to watch and then making memes is easy once you read How to Make Hilarious Memes.
How to Tell a Funny Joke on Tik Tok
Ryanairs social media strategy is all about making funny content first which is why their videos go viral. Comedy is obviously subjective but there are a few key physiological elements behind why we find something funny which we can take advantage of.
How to Have an Unexpected Punchline for your Jokes
Do you know why we laugh?
In most cases, when something is happening your brain is trying to predict what will happen next but when something truly unexpected happens this system freezes. Your brain then releases dopamine to fill in the gap and that’s why you laugh. This is why jokes aren’t funny the 5th time you’ve heard them because you already know the punchline.
In a Tik Tok context, this means that your jokes should have an unexpected punchline or ending. This is getting harder to achieve with so many people making pranks and other sketches over the years but that just means that if you can be truly original then it’s funnier. To do this, you need to be writing your jokes and taking them to several logical extremes. Look at what’s been done before, figure out why that worked, and then apply the same principles but to a completely new ending. This is trial and error and requires you to lose the comedic element of the joke, but the results will be hilarious.
Whatever the punchline, it needs to have some logical connection to the set up in order to still be funny. Random punchlines can work if they’re set up to be random, such as a bad joke, but that’s often a different type of joke altogether. The trick here is to take connections to their logical extreme so they’re funny but also a bit clever.
You can use a spider graph to reach logical extremes or just google the topic. You’re looking for how far you can take an idea without it becoming too ridiculous or losing the comedy. This just takes some time and research, but you can actually create several jokes from this technique.
How to Build up To a Joke on Tik Tok without Boring People
The average human attention span is around 8 seconds however I’d argue that for online purposes it’s 5 seconds. Tik Tok is a platform where you can swipe and immediately be met with thousands of videos so if you’re finding a post boring you can just swipe off it and instantly see something more interesting. This means that you’ve got to achieve quite a lot within 3-5 second bursts or else people will get bored.
Ryanair mostly uses templates or sounds which often are designed to grab attention and keep it until the end but if you’re making your own content then you’ll need to follow a few basic rules in order to keep viewers’ attention.
The first is to have something new happening every 3 or 4 seconds. If the average attention span is around 5 seconds (to my estimate which is what I base all of my analysis off) then you want to be coming in under that to be safe. Something new could be a sound, a caption, a new shot, or anything that grabs the viewers’ attention. The idea here is to be constantly giving the viewer something new to pay attention to until the punchline comes.
The second rule is to have every element within a post achieve a purpose. For a comedic video, this would for every new shot, sound, or text to add or build up to the joke. Think of this exactly like filmmaking but on a much faster scale. Don’t have “scenes” that repeat themselves for no reason or don’t build up to the punchline. Remember, a viewer can swipe off to something more interesting in an instant, so you’ve got to make sure every element of a post is high quality.
A Side Note: How Efficient Ryanairs Social Strategy is
On a quick side note, Ryanair has a very efficient strategy for all of their social media because it often only requires 1 person to run it. Yes, I’m sure they have a whole team of marketers behind the scenes that perform hashtag research and such but from a content creator perspective, 1 lone person could easily be running the show.
This is in contrast to other airlines efforts who often have a whole crew of people on soundstages or travelling about in each video. Ryanair has a reputation for being a low budget airline and this reflects in their Tik Tok as it feels cheap. They use this cheap feel to add to the comedy which is why they feel like any other Tik Toker and not a business.
The majority of their posts are also a success which is in contrast to almost every other brand who have several failures surrounding some successes. I don’t think all of Ryanairs videos work, especially their longer videos where they waffle about quite a bit and don’t have great punchlines, but the majority do and overshadow their failures. Overall, RyanAir on Tik Tok is a great case study for how to run a Tik Tok.
Overview
- Ryanair is a content creator first and a business second
- Ryanair is a master of social commentary and uses different events/templates to touch on experiences whilst telling jokes
- You can use social commentary by using a trending show/piece of media and relating that to an experience that customers would experience (such as events at work)
- Use Capcut to find new templates that you can use to get ahead of trends or learn how to be hilarious and make the best joke using a template
- When telling a joke, you need to have an expected punchline and you need to build up to it quickly, so people don’t get bored
Do you want to grow your brand using Tik Tok?
Pingback: How To Use Memes To Grow Your Social Media Following In 2023 - Jambuckett