How Ryanair is using social media to keep you coming back for more

For travelers outside of Europe, discovering budget airlines for the first time feels like a revelation. It can easily cost more money to buy a bagel and latte in New York City than it does to get a round trip flight between two European cities—that is, if you’re clever enough to wear all of your clothes onto the plane, minimalist enough to fit your carry-on belongings into a manila envelope, and savvy enough to avoid the extra fees for choosing a seat, checking in at the airport, checking a bag, getting your ticket printed or emailed to you, using the toilet, or getting up before the fasten seatbelt sign has been turned off.

OK, some of those extra fees are made up, but most of them aren’t. The CEO of Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, is so aware of his passengers’ ire for extra fees that he has decided to use their anger against them. 

And it’s working.

Instead of trying to improve customer service, reduce surprise fares, or create a better on-board experience, O’Leary has let loose a social media team with just two rules, according to a recent profile by Skift: They can’t make jokes about safety, and they couldn’t laugh at Queen Elizabeth. Aside from that, anything could fly.

“We hired a group of kids under the age of 25 and sent them forth and said, ‘Look, write whatever you want on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,’” O’Leary told Skift recently.

“I don’t understand TikTok, don’t follow it, never gone on it. To me, it is mindless rubbish, but millions of people around the world follow Ryanair’s account. I think we are now by far one of the biggest corporate entities on TikTok.”

Incredibly, there is actually research to support that social media engagement from low-cost airlines can do wonders to improve customer loyalty—even in the absence of anything remotely resembling “service.” Researchers from the National Taiwan Normal University and California State University published a paper last year investigating how Taiwanese people’s trust in budget airlines was influenced by the companies’ social media strategies.

Low-cost airlines (LCAs) “typically reduce costs in several ways (e.g. hiring fewer employees, skipping some service procedures, and minimizing the frequency of interacting with customers),” the paper, published in Research in Transportation Business and Management, says. “As a result, cost reduction usually results in lower service and product qualities, causing negative influences on customers’ trust and commitment.”

The researchers found that as customers engage more with low-cost airlines’ social media accounts, they are more likely to trust the airline, commit to them, and perceive higher value. “These results suggest that customer engagement in LCA’s social media plays a crucial role for LCAs that adopt low-cost strategies to attract customers,” the researchers wrote.

The study didn’t investigate whether negging customers is the best way to win their trust, but for Ryanair, it seems to be a brilliant “we’re in on the joke” strategy. While other airlines of course have their own social media strategies, many seem to trend more toward helpful tips or destination guides than insulting their passengers. But where Ryanair has over 2 million TikTok followers, Southwest Airlines and EasyJet have about 320,000 and 265,000 respectively.

Ryanair has received significant press for its ‘we know you’ll crawl back to us eventually’ approach, and O’Leary is often quoted for brash, unfiltered statements most corporate executives probably couldn’t get away with. It has become one of the tricks he deploys to rile up customer ire and make headlines. Most recently, he called out Boeing execs for spewing “corporate bullsh*t” in response to the 737 Max crisis.

Of the airline’s pinned TikToks, which have a combined 16 million views, is one video of “Ryanair 101.”

“We’re Ryanair, of course we’re randomly going to allocate your seat,” one guy says in the video, while planking across three seats. “We’re Ryanair, your bag’s a priority, not you,” another purported staffer says, while pushing the first guy onto the floor and praising his luggage for being “a good bag.”

The TikTok channel also pokes fun at “passengers always crawling back to us,” and riffs on trending memes like a video from a massively subpar Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow that went viral earlier this year.

You don’t need an academic study to see how well this is working.

“Ryanair marry me,” one user commented on that video.

Of course, the airline responded in character: “Politely I decline.”

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