Transcription
The biggest difference between winning and losing on social media is the hook. And while most videos lose viewers in the first 5 seconds, this is how you avoid that problem altogether. I've spent my entire professional career studying and testing hooks. From old school copywriting to what is working across YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok right now. And these are the eight strategies you need to know to write hooks that can stop anyone in their tracks.
Strategy number one, you don't have a hook, you have a hooking problem. John Capable was a copywriter working in the 1920s. He wrote ads that generated extraordinary response rates for decades. And the structures he used are the direct ancestors of almost every viral hook format that exists today. His most famous line, "They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play," was not just a good hook. Read the full ad and there are hooks embedded all the way through. An embarrassment hook out of the gate. An underdog hook built inside it. Micro payoff scattered across every section. And the biggest payoff held until the very end. One hook at the top was never the point. The entire piece was the hook.
The way to think about this is super hook, hook, and mini hook. The super hook is your biggest, most open question, the one the viewer is waiting on the entire time. Now, hooks sit underneath that, each one serving the super hook. Mini hooks sit underneath those small quick questions that open and close without closing the bigger ones above them. And in between, you use rehooks, moments where you deliberately pull the viewer back to the original super hook, reminding them what they're still waiting on and keeping that tension alive. If the super hook closes early before the video is done, brain logs the main event as finished and starts looking for something else. This feels new and unique to videos, but it's been happening on sales pages since the beginning of advertising.
Before planning any hook, write this at the top of your page. "By the end of this video, my viewer will know how to blank." Now, that blank is your super hook payoff, or what we'll call bait. Every other hook in the content works in service of keeping that open long enough to reach it. That sentence is what you build everything else around.
Next is strategy number two, which is how to avoid a weak payoff in your hooks. The payoff is the result, reveal, or value the viewer gets for watching. It is arguably the most important part of the hook. Take these two payoffs for the same video. First, "By the end of this, you'll know how to improve your hooks." Okay? Second, "By the end of this, you'll know how to hook 10 times the viewers and keep their attention past 90% of the video." Same topic, same creator, but one of those has real payoff. It gives you something real to work with. The other does not. The strength of the hook you end up writing is a direct reflection of how strong that payoff is. A weaker payoff makes a weaker hook every single time. There is no writing your way around it.
The payoff also does a second job. It becomes your bait. That is the specific concrete thing you put on the hook that gives the viewer a reason to lean in. Which means you need the payoff figured out before you're writing anything else. You cannot write the bait before you know what the payoff is. And without bait, the hook is literally empty. So, the next time you try to write a hook, complete this sentence first. "By the end of the video, you'll know how to blank." Then ask one question. Is that payoff specific enough to be surprising? Would someone actually sit through a full 8 n 10-minute video to get it? If the answer is no, make the payoff bigger before touching the hook itself.
Now, let's move to strategy number three. The importance of structure. These three things are conditions that all have to be true at the same time or the hook will not work. Action, bait, tension. Okay, so the word bait comes straight from old school direct response. The logic was simple. A bear fish hook does not catch much. You put bait on to give the fish a reason to bite. Action is the verb, the movement, the signal that something is happening. We want content in an active state because momentum matters. Bait is the payoff, the specific thing that makes a viewer lean forward. Tension is where the contradiction or surprise lives. It's the gap between what the viewer expects and what you're offering.
Now, that gap is what the loop is made of. Most fail because they lack bait, creating a false loop. So, "Something crazy happened today" is a false loop. Nothing specific in it. No payoff implied, no real reason to care. Real bait makes the viewer care about the answer before the question is even fully formed. "A lot of money" is vague bait. "4.3 million in 11 months" is real bait. Same subject, but only one actually hooks. Now, action and bait without tension shows something happening with a payoff, but there's no open question pulling the viewer forward. No question, no loop. Bait and tension without action create intrigue only.
Now, all three have to overlap. Take this hook. "Most founders ignore the most profitable page on their site until it's too late." Okay? Action: ignore. Bait: most profitable page. Tension: until it's too late. Remove one and the hook stops working. So after writing any hook, answer these three questions. What is the action? What is the bait? And what is the tension? If you can't answer all three with something specific, the one you can't answer is where to start. And specifically on bait, look at the last few hooks you've written and try to underline the specific concrete thing that makes the payoff worth waiting for. If you can't underline anything specific, that's a false loop. So, fix the bait before you touch anything else.
Strategy number four is what pushes a functioning hook into a genuinely strong one. And it's recognizing that tension is your weapon. Throughout my entire professional career, as far back as I can remember, the hooks that I noticed working all completed the same phrase, and it's this. "I never thought it was possible, but..." that is the tension test. If your hook fits at the end of that sentence and genuinely sounds surprising, you have real tension. If it sounds obvious, you don't. "Let's talk about hooks." "I never thought it was possible, but let's talk about hooks." Clearly not a hook. "One headline doubled conversions without changing the offer." Okay. "I never thought it was possible, but one headline doubled conversions without changing the offer." Okay, that one holds. The test is that simple, and it has never failed me.
Once you know you have tension, the next step is making one part unexpected. Take the hook. "Most founders ignored the most profitable page until it's too late." Works. But now let's make the subject surprising. "The founders who ignored it were not startup rookies. They were billion-dollar CEOs." Okay. The subject carries a status contradiction. Now the bait and tension haven't changed. But the who is unexpected. So once your action, bait, and tension are working. These three things strengthen the hook further. One, subject. Who this is about. That helps in filtering your audience. Two, proof. It adds credibility to bait, as in, "I've tested this on 200 clients." Three, time. Adds urgency, such as, "I did this in 90 days."
Most tension in hooks comes from one of a few patterns. People think it's X, but it's actually Y. People think it's hard, but it's simple. People think it's easy, but it's harder than they expect. A hidden problem nobody has named yet. A result that happens faster than expected. A trusted belief or authority turns out to be wrong. If you can spot the pattern, you can push the tension further. So after writing a hook, run the "I never thought it was possible but" test. If you can't instantly identify what the tension is, there's a good chance you have a false loop rather than real tension.
Strategy number five is how to take hooks to the next level by using the multi-purpose super hook. A super hook combines five types of loops. The five loop types that appear most consistently across strong hooks are explanation. Okay, but why? What's the reason? Mechanism. Okay, how does that even work? Revelation. What's the hidden thing nobody's talking about? Outcome. And then what happened? And the stupidity loop. Why on earth would anyone do that?
So let's take this example. "I tested 100 hooks and all but three failed." Run ABT on it. Action: tested. Bait: hooks. Tension: all but three failed. Subject is built-in. Now count the questions. It opens. Okay. What was wrong with the 97? What worked about the three? Are you maybe the problem? Are your hooks actually good enough? Maybe the issue is not the hooks at all. One viewer will ask all of those questions simultaneously. Multiple viewers will each latch on to a different one. That is what makes it a super hook. It drives multiple loops at once, pulling a wider audience in and pulling each individual person in even harder.
Now, the goal is not to force all five. It's to be deliberate about which ones you're opening and whether there are the right ones for your audience. So after writing a hook, list every question it opens and which of the loop types each one belongs to. If you find only one type, you have a hook. If you find two or more across different types, you are building toward a super hook. Now the distinction matters because super hooks don't just pull more viewers, they pull more viewers in harder because different people inside the same audience respond to different questions. The most powerful hooks in history didn't use one hook type. They nested two inside each other and that is not an accident.
So John Capable's line we looked at earlier, "They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play," it has been rifted on, rebuilt, and borrowed from over a hundred years. Now the reason it holds up is that it carries two hook types running simultaneously. The first half, "They laughed when I sat down," is an embarrassment hook. It triggers the fear of humiliation, creates social stakes, and immediately puts the reader on the side of the person being mocked. Now, the second half flips to an underdog hook. The same person who just got humiliated is now triumphant. Two emotional registers, one line, all the questions of both. That is what makes it a super hook.
And this doesn't stop at one or two. What you need to notice is that super hooks can be created from seemingly mundane things like a pattern interrupt. The speaker says suddenly, "Okay, the camera's off, but it's still rolling as they start talking." Feels like the viewer is seeing something they shouldn't. Or a filter hook. "The good thing about owning goats." Okay, polarizing and specific. It attracts the right audience. An avatar hook that will speak directly to a specific person. Old school example is "To you who bake." A react to hook. Now, this leverages someone else's audience. So, Leila Hormoszi told me to do this with my email marketing. I didn't. I lost money. A genuine reaction hook. "Holy, the stock market is tanking!" And then you have embarrassment hooks, underdog hooks, the usage trigger hook, the bandwagon hook, the insider or secret hook. All classic persuasion patterns. So, pick one hook type you have not used deliberately before and write a hook in that format for a piece of content you're already planning. Then, combine it with another type of hook. Now, that's how you start mastering the art of writing super hooks.
Strategy number seven is understanding the momentum of a hook. Nested hooks mirror how attention works. So super hook is the distant reward held open until the very end. The hooks beneath it keep viewers moving by closing one loop and opening another. And the mini hooks are the periodic small payoffs, tiny dopamine hits. Aim for one new open loop every 12 to 15 seconds. And no need for a major revelation every 12 seconds. You just need to renew curiosity with a tease, partial answer, or a rehook. Content works exactly the same way. If tension goes flat, attention drops. The mini hooks don't all have to dramatically raise the stakes. Their job is to stay alive. But the hooks they nest under do need to raise stakes. And the super hook should carry the highest stakes of all.
Map your next video, post, or even page using the nested hooks structure before scripting or writing it. Label super hook, your hooks, and your mini hooks right on the script. Confirm the super hook payoff lands last. Then mark every loop opening in the script and check that no stretch runs longer than 15 seconds without a new question being raised. Otherwise, retention drops. Finally, read back through each hook and ask whether the tension is higher there than at the previous one. If any hook feels equal or lower than the one before it, add specificity, a number, a concrete detail, something real. The goal is that the viewer who reaches the super hook payoff feels the full weight of everything that built to it and the rush of acquiring that payoff.
Finally, strategy number eight, the silent hook killer that can undo all the work you've done until now. Once the hook formula catches on, once enough creators are using the same pattern, the same opener, the same structure, it stops working. The viewer's brain has seen it before. The surprise is gone and the loop never fully opens. This has happened to dozens of hook formats that were genuinely powerful when they were new. The "Here's what nobody tells you about" opener or the "I spent X days doing Y" structure, the POV text hook. They all worked when they were fresh, then they were everywhere, then they were dead.
Two more checks sit on top of formula awareness. First, look for the word "because" anywhere inside your hook and remove it. "I grew my channel 10x because I changed my thumbnail strategy." The answer is sitting inside the line, so it's not a hook. Second, embedded hooks and mini hooks throughout the video don't need to be brilliant. They just need to be there. So, moving forward, run three checks on every hook before publishing. One, does the word "because" appear anywhere in the hook? If yes, rewrite it to remove it. Two, has this surface format been used widely enough that it no longer surprises anyone? If yes, keep the ABT structure and then just change the language entirely. Three, for every embedded hook through the video, ask what question your viewer already has right now. At that point in the content, answer it briefly and open the next one immediately.
So, these were the eight strategies to create a brilliant hook. If you want to go deeper into how to hook and hijack anyone's imagination, that video is right.