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Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
How to Create Viral Hooks That ACTUALLY Get Views - 843
00:30:13
In today’s episode, Brock Johnson breaks down how to create viral hooks that actually get views on Instagram and TikTok. He’ll discuss strategies for crafting attention-grabbing hooks in the first 3 seconds of your Reels and videos to maximize...
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Brock Johnson
Everyone's loving family Freedom from T Mobile. We'll pay off four phones up to $3200 and give you four free phones all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone16128GB8999 eligible trade in eg iPhone11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile. I'm about to share with you exactly how you can make better for your reels in order to get more views and potentially go viral. By far the most important part of any short form video, whether it's a reel, a YouTube short, or a TikTok, is the hook. Those first few seconds are absolutely key. It doesn't matter if the rest of your video has a great story or a super educational tip or the cure for cancer. If those first few seconds aren't powerful enough to grab someone's attention, the rest of your video is a waste of time. And that's why I believe that the majority of your time, energy and effort should be spent on those first few moments of your video. The first few frames, the first one to two sentences, and the first three seconds. And so that's why in today's episode, I'm gonna share with you seven tips to creating better hooks for social media and seven different kinds of hooks that you can use with examples of each. But before we even get into the tips or the ideas or the examples, I have a super juicy hack that you're going to be able to use that you can keep in mind for the rest of today's episode. And it's what I like to call the hook swap strategy. Here's what the strategy is. Basically take the content that you've already posted, the talking head reels, the videos, the stories. Take the content that has already been shared that maybe didn't perform very well, or maybe you just thought it could have performed better. Maybe you thought it should have gone viral, or maybe there was a really great story or a really great tip in the video and but it just didn't get the recognition that it deserved. Take that content and either replace the existing hook with one of the stronger hooks that you're going to learn in today's episode, or if that original video didn't have a hook to begin with, create a new hook and add it onto the front of the video. It doesn't matter that you've already posted the video, because remember a few minutes ago you've already decided that not enough people saw it or didn't get enough views or didn't get the appreciation that it deserved. And even if some people did see it, the likelihood that they're going to remember seeing it, especially remember seeing it when it a different hook, is going to be super, super slim. There's going to be like 1%, maybe probably even less than 1% of people who remember that they saw this post before. And that small group of people who does remember, they only remember because it was that good and so they probably wouldn't mind seeing it again. So yes, what I'm telling you is to go back through all of the short form videos that you've posted over the last few months and pick out the ones that didn't get the recognition they deserve. They didn't get enough views. Or maybe you just thought it was a super juicy tip and it should have got more engagement. Take that video, use the hook strategies that you're going to learn in today's episode and apply it to that video. And you're welcome. Now you'll get more views and you won't have to do as much work to create new content that's actually going to get views. But with that being said, let me get into my top seven tips for improving your hooks on Instagram. And let me tell you that the tips I'm going to share with you today, as well as the examples and ideas that I'm going to share with you towards the end of the episode, are not just from my brain. They're not just randomly picked out of the universe. These are strategies that have been proven to work not just over the last few months or few years on social media, but these are strategies that have been proven to work for hundreds of years. And I know what you're probably thinking, brock. There weren't TikToks a hundred years ago, Brock. There were no Instagram reels back in the 1800s. I hear you. But there were books, there were newspapers, and there was news. And that's why you'll often hear me say that hooks aren't strategy. They're not something that was invented for social media. Sure, social media has really accelerated the pace at which hooks have become popular and studied, and the pace at which we can discern what a good hook is versus what a bad hook is. But hooks are the covers of books. It's the headlines on newspapers, it's the first sentence in the chapter, right? It's the thing that's going to keep you consuming the content for longer. And so the idea of needing an effective hook isn't necessarily new. But I can guarantee you in today's episode, you will learn something new about hooks to improve your content. Tip number one for improving your hooks is to empathize with your audience. The better that you can understand who your target audience is, the better you're going to create content for them. Basically, the more intricacies and details that you know about either who your existing followers are or, or who you want your existing followers to be, the better you can create content for them. The more you can use words that they understand and that really tug on their heartstrings, the more you can talk about topics and choose things to say that are really going to grab their attention and hook them in. And I know we're talking about hooks today, so I'm not going to go too far off subject, but the foundation for growing a following on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, on Twitter, on threads, on any social media platform is to know your niche, to know your market, to know exactly who it is that you're trying to reach. If you're trying to reach everyone on the planet, it's going to be very tough to come up with hooks and languaging and opening sentences that grab their attention. Because something that's going to grab a 21 year old college student athlete's attention is very different than what's going to grab the attention of a 72 year old grandmother of 17 kids who lives in the Middle east, right? Totally different things are going to grab their attention. And so the more you know about the pain points, the struggles, the dreams, the challenges, the financial status, the education level, the marital relationship status, the interests and hobbies and passions of your ideal audience, the better you're going to be able to create hooks that actually do their job of hooking them in and grabbing their attention. But admittedly, empathy is a skill set. It is something that is developed over time. You can't just pick out who your target audience is and then sudden empathy for them. You have to practice to get good at understanding what their needs, their desires, their wishes, their dreams and all that other stuff actually is tip number two. And really the rest of the tips of my seven tips for improving your hooks are a lot more practical and tactical than empathy. But I will say I think empathy is the most important one. So with that being said let's move on to tip number two, which is in regards to how long your hooks should be. Your hooks, generally speaking, should be between five and eight words. We at the Insta Club Hub recently conducted a study of about 1300 different viral Instagram reels. And for this analysis, we classified viral as any reel with more than 1 million views. And we took all of those, we transcribed them, and then we took out the first sentence of the reel. And what we found was the ones that consistently performed the best and got the most views were between five and eight words long. I will tell you that you can go up to 12 words, but what we see is as soon as you use less than five or more than 12 words, the return on investment or the number of views and the amount of engagement that you're receiving, it starts to decline relatively rapidly. So sure, it's okay to have a four word hook, it's okay to have a 15 word hook, and there are definitely outliers of people who went viral with 27 word hooks. But generally speaking, try to keep that first sentence to five to eight words. And when I say that first sentence, I don't necessarily just mean the words that you're saying because sure, you might be someone who does talking head reels or voiceover reels. And so that makes sense. I'm going to keep the first sentence that I say to five to eight words. But this also applies to those of you who primarily do meme reels or B roll reels, the kinds of reels where you're not talking. There's no face on the screen talking to the camera, but there's just some text on the screen, maybe layered on top of a funny video or a B roll video of you make that text on the screen follow the same general rule of five to eight words. Tip number three is to keep it simple, to dumb it down, to not use words in your hook that are above a fifth grade reading level. The simpler you can make your hooks, the better. And this is not because your followers are dumb. Though I will admit that the average media literacy rate is declining. This is not because you are trying to attract low hanging fruit and this is because most people are distracted. I mean, think about it. As you are listening to this episode right now, you're likely doing at least one other thing. Maybe you're also scrolling on reels. Maybe you're also doing the dishes. Maybe you're also working out. Chances are you're at least doing something else while watching or listening to this. I highly doubt you're sitting in a classroom with this on your tv and you're like writing notes. If you are, take a picture, post those on your Instagram stories and tag me, because I need to see that unicorns like you still exist. But if you're like everyone else, you're probably distracted. You're probably doing multiple things at once. And so when the hook in your reel uses some fancy term or some acronym or insider lingo or just anything that your average follower would not understand, people don't take the time to stop and figure it out. They're not going to crack open a dictionary and a thesaurus and go to Google and start trying to figure out what those words and acronyms mean. They're probably just going to scroll away. When you confuse, you lose. One key thing that I just said that you might have missed is that you want the words to be understood by your ideal audience. So yes, dumb it down, keep it simple, below a fifth grade reading level. But you should also consider where your ideal audience is at. And the ideal audience you are trying to attract might understand words and phrases that a different ideal audience might not. For example, I love Pokemon. I subscribe to a lot of Pokemon YouTube channels. I watch a lot of Pokemon videos on TikTok and on Instagram. And when a video about Pokemon comes up, they don't have to simplify their hook to say, hey, you know that video game that was popularized in the late 1990s, that was originally called Pocket Monsters, where you travel around and you try to capture and battle with different colorful monsters? They don't have to say that because they don't have to do that background. They don't have to give that context because their ideal target follower understands what Pokemon is. Their ideal follower might understand some of the terms and topics that the average person on the planet might not. And so that's why it's important to understand who your target audience is, because you don't need to dumb it down so far that like literally anyone could understand. But you do need to simplify it enough so that your average target audience member will understand. And I don't know about you, but it's been a while since I was in fifth grade. So I don't know exactly what a fifth grader's vocabulary level is. So a simple way to check is just to take the hook that you plan on putting on your video or that you plan on saying at the beginning of your video, pop it into any basic AI tool. I usually just pop it into ChatGPT and then I will ask it is this at or below a 5th grade reading level? Or if I have a hook that I've come up with that I think might be a little bit too wordy or too advanced, I will ask ChatGPT to help make it simpler or more concise or just easier to understand. An easy example of when I've done this wrong recently is I posted a talking head reel where my opening sentence I said to the camera if you loathe talking head videos. And then I went on to talk about what you should do if you dislike creating talking head reels. But why did I use the word loathe? That was a mistake I made. I should have used the word hate or dread something that is simpler and easier to understand and easier to pronounce than loathe. Like who was I trying to impress? Dumb it down. Keep it simple. More people will understand your content, more people will consume it, more people will engage. Tip number four also relates to the words that you're saying or the words that are on the screen. And it's be negative if possible. Now when I say be negative, I don't mean that you have to be a Debbie Downer. And I know you might be a positive person. I myself consider myself quite an optimistic positive person. But that doesn't mean that you can't be negative in your hooks. And here's what I mean by that. Simply by using a negative word like don't stop, avoid, stay away from, crash diet, lose, et cetera, those sorts of things are going to grab people's attention more than their positive counterparts, I bet. And you can check me on this right now, go to ESPN or go go to SportsCenter's website and I bet you a lot of their headlines will be negative. They will be the the team lost the game, the person got hurt, something like that. A great easy example of this that I saw recently on ESPN was that a team won a game. But rather than the headline being the team won the game, which would be positive, it said the team snapped a three game losing streak. Snapped is a negative word. It's also quite a strong verb. It's not won, it's snapped. Right? It's very aggressive, it's strong. And then they didn't just snap anything, they snapped a three game losing streak. Again, focusing on the negative, it's ultimately a positive story. But the headline, also known as the hook, is framed in a negative point of view, which is more likely to grab our attention. Marketing is 80% psychology. I am a firm believer that making great Content is more about psychology than it is about tricks and tips. And so let's think about human psychology for a second. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have evolved to pay a lot more attention to the things that could kill us and things that could harm us. The things that are dangerous and negative, rather than the positive things. A couple hundred thousand years ago, when we were living in caves, we had to pay attention to the poisonous berry or the lion that was going to stalk us tonight. A lot more than the pretty sunset or the butterfly that just flopped by. My one word of caution with negative hooks is you don't want to overdo it. Unfortunately, I can't give you an exact statistic or an exact percentage of the time that you should be negative versus positive. But if every single one of, or let's say greater than 80%, I told you I wasn't gonna give you a percentage, and then I did. If you do more than 80% of your content with a negative hook, it can start to have diminishing returns because over time, people stop paying attention to your negative hooks because everything is negative. Every single hook that you have is so in their face that they kind of get bored with it, and then they either unfollow or they become disengaged. So use negative hooks, but don't use them on every single post that you make. My fifth tip for improving your hooks has nothing to do with the text on the screen or the words that we just said, but it's arguably more important, and that is the visual. What is on the screen, not just in those first three seconds, but even in that first half a second, even in those first few frames. What are people seeing? Is that going to grab their attention? A few quick things to keep in mind when you're considering the visuals of your hooks is, number one, brighter is usually better. We've seen that videos that just have a slightly brighter hook average about 60% more engagement. So it doesn't mean that you need to make your hooks like overexposed and super bright, but just making sure that they're not dimly lit, making sure that you have vibrant colors on that you maybe slightly turn up your brightness or your exposure or your saturation so that the video really pops and stands out from those before it. That can be a great way to visually grab people's attention. Besides that, we also see that having a person's face and especially their eyes on the screen within the first second really improves retention. People are more interested in people most of the time. And so when there's a human being, especially a human being who we can see their eyes, right? They're not wearing sunglasses or something in those first few seconds. It's more likely to grab our attention. We also find that hooks perform a lot better when there is a visual prop or element or even just like clip art, something on the screen or that relates to the topic of the video. A mistake that I think people often make is they think, oh, I need to grab people's attention. So at the beginning of this video I'm going to put an emoji of a monkey or I'm going to put a gif of a dancing clown because that's really exciting and that'll grab people's attention and it might, but it's also going to really confuse them and frustrate them and make it feel like you're just trying to gamify or fool them into continuing to watch. And so don't use silly props, don't add unnecessary elements. Make sure that if you're doing a video about rock climbing, you are rock climbing, or maybe there's a rock climber in the background, or maybe you're at a rock climbing gym, but don't use some random unnecessary prop or element. My sixth tip for improving your hooks is to consider the audio. We oftentimes forget that audio is half of video. So people spend so much time focusing on getting an HD camera and what's on the screen and is it clear and high contrast when we forget that audio is so important. I'll never forget I was having a conversation with a well known youtuber when I was first starting to blow up and have a lot of followers on Instagram. And he was like, dude, why are you not using an external mic for your reels? And I was like, what do you mean? Is my phone's microphone quality not good enough? And he was like, look at this one. And he played me my reel from that day and it sounded like I was like filming in like a tunnel or something, like there was echoes and it just sounded super hollow. And so luckily this was a good friend and so he gave me a microphone. But to this day I have never not considered my audio before creating my content or before pressing post. So besides just the video, make sure that you're paying attention to the audio in those first three seconds. Three things that you can do to easily improve the audio version of your hooks is number one, make sure that your audio levels are equal. Basically make sure that your music isn't too high and your voice isn't too low or vice versa. You want to make sure that things are balanced and so that as someone is listening to it, what they are hearing is what you want them to hear. Speaking of making sure that they are hearing what you want them to hear, get yourself an external microphone. If you don't have a good friend who's just going to lend you one like I did, go on Amazon or go to your local tech store and just purchase a 10 15$20 external microphone. I do find that the ones that plug right into your device, whether you're using your phone or a professional camera, the ones that plug right in are actually usually better and cheaper until you get to a certain point. Yes, there are some distinctions and yes there are some great USB wireless microphones, but honestly the plug in ones work great. You don't have to worry about charging them oftentimes and they produce really great sound quality. Additionally, when you're improving the audio quality of your hooks, consider the music that's playing in the background. Using popular songs, trending audios, or even just stock copyright free music can really improve your video. Maybe you're going to add an inspirational piano onto the background of your motivational message. Maybe you're going to add some music that really builds suspense and tension to keep someone watching to the end. Maybe you're going to use some rock and roll music to go along with your more aggressive in your face. Video music is so important for eliciting an emotional response and getting your audience to continue watching. There are some really funny examples on YouTube that you can find where they'll take a popular Hollywood movie and they'll remove the music from the background so you can still hear the native sounds that were in the scene. You can still hear the characters talking, but without the music the feeling is totally different. And then last but not least, sound effects can be used really well. Don't use the silly goofy sound effects like alarm bells for no reason. Be intentional and make sure that your sound effects actually relate to whatever the video or whatever the topic is. And then my final tip for improving your hooks before I share some examples and ideas with you is to create what's called a curiosity gap. The curiosity gap is a little bit of a Goldilocks situation. And let me tell you what I mean by that. When you are planning out what that first sentence is going to be or what your hook is going to include, you want to elicit enough curiosity that someone wants to keep watching. But if you elicit too much curiosity, if there's too much ambiguity or Too much unknown in the beginning of your video, again, you're going to confuse and you're going to lose. So when that curiosity gap is too wide, people just aren't going to keep watching. They're not interested. Maybe they don't know what your video is about. Maybe there's too many words that they didn't quite understand and so they're going to scroll. On the other hand, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there can also be curiosity gaps that are too narrow, where you kind of spill all the tea and you give all the answers and you share everything that everyone would want to know in those first few seconds. For example, maybe there's a real estate agent who's making a reel, helping other real estate agents to sell homes. And so on their hook, they're like, okay, I'm going to use negative words. I'm going to keep it short and simple. And so I'm going to say something like, the reason you're not selling homes is because you're not doing enough open houses. Well, that was negative. And I don't. I didn't count how many words that was. But it was relatively short. It was relatively simple. But you spilled all the tea. You gave me everything I need to know. There was no curiosity gap. There's no reason for me to continue watching your video because either I agree and I'm like, you're right, I'm probably not doing enough open houses, and so I'm just gonna start doing that, or I disagree. I'm like, yeah, no, I disagree. I'm actually doing enough open houses. I have a different problem. And either way, I already know what you're gonna tell me, and so I'm not interested in continuing to watch the video. So that would be an example of a curiosity gap that's too small. On the other end of the spectrum, a real estate agent might say, here's why you're not having success. That's so vague. Success in what terms? Financial lifestyle. Here's why you, like, who is you? Real estate agents, people who are selling homes, people who are trying to learn to do a 360 on a snowboard. Like, who are we even talking to? What is success? It's so vague. And your thought is, oh, well, it's so vague it could apply to anyone. But the reality is, when you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one effectively. And so we gotta find that Goldilocks zone. We gotta find that sweet spot where the curiosity gap is interesting people, and they want to continue watching to hear what else you have to say, but you're not withholding too much information or giving away too much too soon. Those are my seven tips for improving your hooks. I will throw in one more bonus tip, which is that success leaves clues. So as you're scrolling through social media, just pay attention to your own consumption habits. If there's a video that really grabs your attention and it really hooks you in, it really makes you want to keep watching. Just pay attention to why was there a word in the hook? Was there something they did? Was there something in the video, in the audio, in the visual? Just pay attention to how you use and consume on social media and you'll start to pick up on little hooks and little ideas that you can incorporate and apply to your own content. With that being said, I'm going to share some of those clues with you right now. Here are seven different hook ideas that are proven to be effective, and they can be used in almost any niche on repeat. The first one is what I call the problem hooks. These hooks are all about identifying a pain point, a challenge, or a problem that your ideal audience is dealing with. Again, going all the way back to tip number one. We gotta empathize with our ideal audience to truly know what they are struggling with. A mistake that I see so many people making with their hooks is they're calling out pain points that your audience doesn't already know that they have. And here's the key distinction. You might know that your audience has this pain point, but if they don't already know that they have that pain point, then you have double the work. You don't just have the work of hooking them into your video, but you also have the hook of convincing them that this is a problem that they didn't know that they had. For example, if you're in the fitness niche, you could say something like, if you're working out five days a week but not seeing results, watch this. Or if you're in the parenting toddlers niche, you could say, if you're tired of repeating yourself thousands of times a day, try this instead. Here are some other examples in other niches. The second category of hooks is what I like to call hot take hooks. These are the unpopular opinions, the controversial points of view, or just the unexpected plot twists that are contrary to the norm. For example, if you're a nutritionist, you could say something like, counting calories is the reason you're not losing weight. Or if you're in the mental health niche, maybe your hook is going to be daily journaling is actually making your anxiety worse. Hook idea number three is what I like to call the curiosity gap hook. And yes, while all hooks should create some curiosity, these ones are all about piquing people's interest, getting them to lean forward in their seat and be curious to learn more. For example, if you're in the personal development niche, maybe you're going to use the hook. I bet I can get your lazy ass to stop procrastination in less than two minutes with this easy trick. Or if you're in the real estate investing niche, you could use a hook like with this secret hack, you could buy your first investment property with next to nothing down. Hook idea number five is one of my personal favorites. It's one that I use all the time and it's one of our top performing hooks in our paid media, also known as the ads that we run. We see that this style of hook works really well in our advertising and it's the shocking stat hook. Basically, for this hook, you lead with some sort of statistic or numerical value that would really surprise people. I do want to encourage you. Do your research, use real stats, don't just make stuff up. But if you can find stats or data that shock people and surprise them, it can be a really powerful way to pique their interest and get them to want to learn a little bit more. For example, if you're in the sleeping niche, maybe your hook is going to be something like. And by the way, these stats are totally made up, so I don't know if they're true. But your hook could be something like, did you know missing just 30 minutes of sleep reduces your productivity by 30%? Or if you're in the dog training niche, maybe the opening stat. And again, I don't know if this is a real stat. Did you know that more than 50% of dogs are overweight? Again, these stats are very surprising. They make people say, whoa, I didn't know that. And then they're curious to hear your explanation as to why. Hook idea number six is what I like to call the call out hooks. And essentially for these ones, you are going to name your target market by name. You're going to call them out, you're going to say exactly who your video is intended for. For example, if you create online guides for elementary school teachers, you could use a hook like if you're a teacher who's planning their lessons on the night before. Watch this. Or if you help people learn to rock climb, you could use a hook like if you have less than 10 days of rock climbing experience. Here's what you need to know. Basically, when you call out a group of people by their exact name, the people who go by that name and who recognize or identify with that group go, oh hey, that's me. And then they keep listening. And then last but not least, the seventh hook idea is transformation hooks. These are hooks that show off a before and after or some sort of change over time. The two key elements in a transformation hook are number one, the thing that is actually transforming, and then number two, the timeframe in which it transformed. Again, I don't want you to spew misinformation, I don't want you to make up stories. But if you can highlight examples of massive transformations or transformations in a relatively short time frame, it really grabs people's attention and makes them want to learn more. For example, if you're in the finance niche, maybe you're going to take a B roll of yourself typing on a computer or writing in a notebook and then you're going to add some text on the screen that says before I started budgeting stressed after I started budgeting, debt free in two months. Or if you're in the skincare niche, you could use a hook that was like I used to be embarrassed to go out in public, but now my skin is totally clear in less than one month. Here's how. Now wait, wait, wait. Before we go, I have one last pro tip that is super helpful to figure out. Are my hooks actually the problem? Because you might be creating great content and maybe your hooks are really good, but the rest of your video is where it's falling flat. Instagram actually gave us a statistic to look up whether or not our hooks are performing well. And before I show you that, don't forget to hit subscribe if you found this valuable today. Every single Thursday, I put out a new episode on the latest tricks and tips and strategies to growing and having success on social media. So don't forget to hit subscribe. But now let me show you this statistic. All you have to do when viewing your individual reel is tap the View Insights button and then scroll down. Down towards the bottom of the page you will see a statistic that's called View Rate past First three Seconds. It's a mouthful, but basically this statistic is telling us how many people or what percentage of your viewers are watching. After the three second mark, it will show you this pink bar. And if the pink bar surpasses the little tick mark, that means that the average viewer is watching for more than three seconds. If it's right at the tick mark. That means that your average viewer is watching for three seconds. And if it's less than the tick mark, then that means we really need to improve our hooks because that means that the average person isn't even watching the first three seconds. Also below that, you'll see an actual percentage where it tells you what your average is. So you'll be able to see what your baseline is. And I would recommend writing that down today. So, you know, hey, my Average views past first 3 seconds for my typical reel is 41.5 seconds. Okay, I'm going to write that down and then see a month from now have your hooks improved after watching this video and implementing what you learned today in this podcast, is that percentage increasing? And one last thing before I let you go, if you do want a free list of 25 viral hook ideas, this is the actual list of the top 25 viral most popular hooks that we found from that analysis of all of those viral videos. That list of top 25 totally free. I'll put that link down in the show notes below so you can download it and check it out. Don't forget to subscribe. I will see you next Thursday. And as always, happy networking. Foreign this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.