From the West of Ireland to TikTok’s Inner Circle: Rachael Ryan on what makes the platform tick
Rachael Ryan decodes what makes Tiktok different and shares her next business venture
When Galway woman Rachael Ryan moved to New York, it wasn’t for a grand career plan.
“I moved for no other reason than I thought New York was the coolest place in the world and I wanted to live in New York,” she says. A decade later, she had risen to one of the most influential research roles at one of the world’s biggest digital platforms.
Ryan studied French and Spanish before taking a master’s in conference interpreting, a path she quickly realised wasn’t for her. “I didn’t love it. I loved the research part of the masters where I wrote a thesis,” she recalls. That thesis work pointed her towards market research, and after about five years at an agency conducting research across all industries, TikTok came calling.
It was 2021, and the company was at the start of its breakout moment. Ryan was hired as the first global researcher. “Within a year and a half, I was the head of research and insights,” she says.
Tiktok takes off
Ryan joined at a pivotal time. TikTok had experienced enormous growth during the Covid pandemic, as people stuck at home spent more hours on their phones. “Tiktok definitely saw huge growth during 2020 because everybody was stuck at home and this platform was really taking off,” she says.
The platform people were downloading, though, looked very different from the one that exists today. “In those early days, it was very much kind of a dance app and for younger people,” Ryan explains. “But over those five years, it developed into something that was used by billions of people across the world.”
Tiktok is entertainment
For Ryan, the thing that sets TikTok apart is not its audience but its architecture. Traditional social networks, she explains, were built around the people you know. “Social media and why it has the name social media is that it was inherently based off of your social circle. It depended on who you follow, who your friends were, and that would then inform the algorithm.”
TikTok flipped that model. “The game changer for TikTok is that you could watch a video on something, and then that three seconds watching that will lead to lots of videos on the same. So it’s not a social graph; it’s a content graph,” she says. What drives the experience is dwell time, meaning how long you linger on a particular video, rather than who you follow.
The result is a feed that can look nothing like what your friends and family are enjoying. “Something that my friend saw doesn’t mean that I would like that. It’s something that I watched in the past. That would mean that I like the mix,” Ryan says. In her view, this makes TikTok “almost like an entertainment platform rather than a social platform.”
She notes that the approach is spreading. “On TikTok and now on other platforms like Reddit and otherwise, you don’t necessarily follow your friends or family.”
That entertainment identity was never hidden, according to Ryan, and it shaped how the company saw its competition. “There was no smoke and mirrors around that. There’s more money in advertising when it comes to entertainment versus social media, so that was very much out in the open,” she says. “We were looking to Netflix or YouTube as kind of competitors versus Facebook or an Instagram.”
Happy content sells
Perhaps the most striking insight from Ryan’s research is that positivity pays. Platforms, she argues, have a commercial incentive to lift their users’ moods. “The best interests of the platforms, at least from the research I’ve done, is to actually promote content that is making people joyful, feeling inspired, and a little bit happier. Not only is that good for humanity and for us, it’s actually good for sales as well.”
The logic is straightforward. “People are less likely to purchase or feel good enough to kind of carry out a task like buying or considering whatever, if they are in that world of doom and gloom,” she says. For that reason, her team often ran studies on “the ways in which TikTok was bringing joy or sharing stories about people kind of overcoming challenges.”
Homecoming West
Ryan left TikTok in May of this year, after which the entire research and insights team was disbanded. She has since turned her attention closer to home, launching a new venture with her sister, Hannah.
Ryan’s mother, Maeve O’Toole, is originally from Connemara and lives in Westport, so the move is very much a homecoming.
RAYN Collective is a research-led social and creative agency, pairing Ryan’s TikTok background with Hannah’s ten years in influencer marketing. “The aim is to work with businesses to support them in growing their business through social platforms and develop, you know, delivering insights on their audience,” Ryan says.
The agency launched on the back of Ryan’s fireside chat with the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch at the West x West Festival in Castlebar, where she spoke about the importance of human-led storytelling in the age of AI. The sisters are based in the West of Ireland and are planning free marketing clinics for local businesses in November.
Businesses can reach the agency at [email protected] or follow its journey on Instagram at @rayncollective.