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Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
I Studied 1300 Hooks, Here’s What Actually Works - 877
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I studied the hooks on over 1300 viral Instagram Reels, and in today's episode, I'm going to share with you everything that I found. But first and foremost, why did I go on this crazy endeavor? Well, because the hook is the most important part of your content. If your content is super valuable, educational, hilarious, funny, entertaining, captivating, whatever, but the hook doesn't actually do its job and grab people's attention, then the rest of your video is a waste. And that's why I believe that 80% of the time, energy and effort that you spend on content creation spend should be spent just on the hook for each of your posts. I promise you, if you can just improve your hooks and nothing else about your posts, your posts overall will perform better. Get more engagement, more views, and your overall following will grow because of it. I'm always on the lookout for great hooks and content creators who consistently create great hooks. I'm saving them to folders, I'm categorizing them, I'm writing down the hooks, I'm analyzing everything on the screen, the audio, the visual, the text to figure out what actually makes these hooks effective and what makes other hooks flop. Let's begin this conversation about hooks by talking about the text on the screen or the words being said. Oftentimes, these two things will be interchangeable at the beginning of your reel. If you're doing a voiceover reel or a talking head reel where you're actually saying words, or if you're doing a lip sync or a B roll reel where there's just text being written on the screen. Either way, this is essentially the words that are grabbing people's attention. To equate this to something that we're all familiar with, this is like the headline on your newspaper. And according to these 1300 hooks that I studied, the average length of the most viral hooks was 7.7 words long. And generally speaking, the best performing hooks were between five and eight words long. There were also quite a few reels that performed really well that went as high as 12 words. But as soon as the reel went past 12 words and went to 13, 14, 15 plus words in the hook, there were diminishing returns. Basically, the longer the hook was, the worse the video performed. Also, I think it's very interesting to note that there were very few hooks that were less than four words long, and I think that's because it's just hard to get a point across. It's hard to have a complete sentence with two or three words. Of course, there are hooks like unpopular opinion or stop scrolling that grab attention with just two words. But those seem to be more of the outliers that were few and far between besides the length of five to eight words long. According to a ChatGPT reading comprehension analysis of all of these hooks, the average hook from this list was below a fifth grade reading level, which is in alignment with what I normally teach. I oftentimes advise people that their hooks, or even the entire text, everything they say in their content, should be at or below a fifth grade reading level. And that's for a few reasons. Number one, to be quite frank, reading comprehension is lower than you would expect. That's why there was that famous show in the 2000s, Are youe Smarter Than a 5th Grader? And it was really funny because seemingly everyone was not smarter than a fifth grader. Yeah, that's true. That's the unfortunate reality that we live in. Also, number two, and probably more realistically, on social media, it's not that all of your followers and customers are just idiots. It's that they're distracted. They're seeing thousands upon thousands of videos every single day. And so if your hook includes some fancy words, some vocab that's over their head, insider lingo, or an acronym that they don't already know, then they're going to be confused. And when you confuse, you lose. They will scroll away before trying to open up the dictionary and figure out what your hook means. So, so dumb it down. Keep it simple and remember the Drunk Grandma. The Drunk Grandma is a marketing principle that basically means that your marketing your content, your video, should be so easy to understand that a drunk grandma could understand it without any extra context or any extra background. So whether you want to think of a fifth grader or a drunk grandma, that's how simple your hooks should be. The other interesting note about the text on screen or words being said is that on average, negative hooks far outperformed their positive counterparts. And this totally makes sense when we think about human psychology. At the end of the day, content social media marketing is just human psychology, right? It's humans trying to convince other humans to buy something. It's humans trying to grab the attention of other humans. It's just psychology. And it is in our nature as human beings, we are hardwired to pay more attention to the negative than the positive. We are, on average, more likely to notice the threats in our environment than the beautiful things in our environment. So when I say negative words, I mean words like don't stop, avoid, cancel, stay away from no loss. Those sorts of Things are more likely to grab attention in the hook than their positive counterparts. Now, hopefully everything we've talked about so far is already helpful for you, but this is really just scratching the surface when it comes to hooks. In reality, the visual on the screen matters so much more than the words being said or the words being written. That's why, again, to reference modern newspapers, when you look at them, the front cover has a big headline piece of text, but then below it is a ginormous picture. Especially after a big event like the super bowl or an election, there's always a giant photo on the COVID Because at the end of the day, we are visual creatures and Instagram specifically is a visual platform. And so oftentimes the mistake that us content creators and business owners make is we focus so heavily on the words in our hook, which, yes, matters, but we forget about the visual, we forget about what is actually on the screen. And that is is going to be worth so much more. There's that old cliche of a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, yeah, those first few frames of your video are worth so much more than whatever text you write on the screen. The viewer is going to comprehend the visual and they're going to take in what is on the screen before they're able to skim and read the hook or the headline text that you have added. In fact, according to Mr. Beast, in a really great interview that he did on Colin and Samir's podcast with Mark Zuckerberg himself, I highly recommend watching their entire conversation. Mr. B said his most viewed videos on Instagram and Facebook are the videos where he doesn't speak at all. My most viewed reels on your platforms, my most viewed just short form on your platform, are ones where I don't speak. Now, during this segment of the interview, he's primarily talking about how speaking English limits his content because it can't reach people who don't speak English automatically. As soon as he speaks a word in English, the algorithm knows that and thus won't show his post to people who don't speak English. I mean, think about yourself right now. If you only speak one language, do you ever really see posts that are in a different language on your Instagram feed? Probably not. And if you do, it's probably super infrequent. And this interview came out March 27, 2025, which is my birthday, by the way. But now we're almost a year later. And it's funny because Mr. B said that the number one thing that he wants changed on the metal platforms is the ability to use AI to automatically dub and translate reels, which is a thing, by the way, in case you haven't seen any of my recent episodes. Breaking down the latest Instagram news. One of the big new changes that they've made on Instagram in the last few months is that now your reels can be automatically translated and dubbed into, I believe it is, nine different languages. So if you post in English, if you just check the box to auto translate, someone who speaks Spanish or someone who speaks Hindi will be able to watch that reel in their own language. And it will sound like your voice, but your voice will be speaking their language. And they'll even use AI to kind of dub your mouth so that it looks like your lips are saying those words. I digress. That's not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is simply that the visual matters more than the text or words that you are saying in your reels. As an absolute baseline, the visual in your hook needs to relate to what your reel is about. For example, if I'm a fitness coach who's making a talking head reel, I should not be sitting at a desk, I should not be sitting in my car, I should be in the gym, if not actively weightlifting or working out while I'm speaking the reel. If you're someone who makes a lot of what are called B roll reels, where you take just like a behind the scenes B roll video of yourself, you add a trending audio or a song into the background and then you write some text on the screen. Well, the B roll content needs to relate to what the reel is about. Because B roll reels have become so popular on Instagram, a huge mistake that a lot of business owners have been making is taking any random B roll of themselves, oftentimes writing in a notebook or typing on a computer, and then they just slap some text on the screen that is totally unrelated to what is visually going on in the reel. So as a bare minimum, there needs to be a visual that relates to what your reel is about. And to take it a step further and make it even better, we wanna have something dynamic, happening, something changing, something exciting that is about to happen. Maybe we're at the climax of the story and then we're going to jump back and actually tell the story and end up at the climax at the end of the reel. The less cluttered the visual, the better. The higher contrast the visual, the better. The brighter the visual, the better. The more saturated the visual, the better the More that you can direct people's eyes through pointing a finger or using an arrow, the better. The more you can make things big, bold, easy to read and in people's face, the better. If we're thinking about the visual in the same way that we're thinking about the text, the visual needs to be easy to understand in a short amount of time, just like the text needs to be easy to understand in five to eight words. If you can have some sort of problem, impending challenge or negative visual that will grab attention more than a positive visual. And ultimately, if you were to take a screenshot half a second into your reel and show it to a drunk grandma, would she have a pretty good understanding of what's going on or would she be totally lost with all of that being said? And now that you know how to fish, I'm going to give you some fish as well. And what I mean by that specifically is I've broken down the 1300 viral hooks into 15 different categories that you can use as inspiration and repeatable formats for for your own hooks. Also, by the way, if you just want 25 free ideas, I'll put a link down in the show notes below. We have a free guide that has 25 viral Instagram hook ideas that you can use as plug and play hooks in your future reels. Totally free to download. I'll put the link in the show notes. But with that being said, let's get started with the first template. The first template is what I'm going to call a pattern interrupt hook. These are hooks where basically our expectation is broken. People are doom scrolling, their brain is turned off, their brain rotting and they're just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, seeing the same boring hook, the same boring video one after the other. But if you can do something to break the norm, break their expectations or grab their attention, that is out of the ordinary. It's a great way to stop the scroll. For example, maybe there's a sudden movement at the beginning of your reel, like a camera zoom or an effect or a dropping phone or something that is striking across the screen and grabbing their attention. Maybe there's an abrupt and direct statement like the one I said earlier. Stop scrolling. Maybe there's some sort of visual anomaly that we wouldn't expect. Like your video is upside down or it's super zoomed in on your way closer than we would ever expect. Or most of your reels are filmed in your home and suddenly you're out in an open field and you're 300ft away from the camera. Or maybe there's some sort of sound effect at the beginning of your reel that's different than what people would normally expect. Do be careful with the sound option because, number one, if you have a sound that is too loud, it can annoy people and there's basically an unexpected pop and they're just going to scroll away because of the annoyance. Or you also have to be careful with using sound as a hook, because a lot of people watch Instagram on mute. And so if you're relying on some little sou effect at the beginning of your reel to grab attention and people are watching on mute, they're not even going to hear the sound effect. Hook category number two is what I'm going to call the contrarian hook. These hooks are the ones that go against the grain. They're the unpopular opinions or the controversial hot takes. Maybe you're going to tell people to stop doing something that everyone else is telling them that they should do. Maybe you're going to tell people that something that they believe is good is actually bad. Maybe you're going to debunk a myth that people have believed for years or tell them that they're wrong if they believe X, Y and Z. Basically, humans are hardwired to react to threats or disagreements. And so when you say something that they disagree with or that they might perceive as a threat, they're going to continue watching your reel either to hear your argument or to get some ammunition for their own argument that they're going to try to make in the comments. Hook idea number three is the curiosity gap hook. And this one is one that's definitely going to take some practice because the curiosity gap is one where you really have to find the sweet spot. You have to find that Goldilocks zone. If we're thinking of this as a gap between two cliffs and you have someone who's on one cliff, and you want them to make the jump to the other cliff, and that jump signifies them watching and engaging with your reel. If the gap is too small, then they can see over the jump without having to make the jump, which means, to put it into Instagram terms, they're not going to watch the rest of your reel, and they're not going to engage because they know where it's headed. It's not actually that out of the norm. There's not that much curiosity. It's like, yeah, I got it. I understand what the rest of this reel is probably going to be about just from the hook. So that curiosity gap is too small of a gap. As someone who cooks about 95% of their meals at home. And no, that's not an exaggeration. Usually the only meal that Tay and I eat out each week is our Sushi Saturday. What we eat, what we prepare, it matters a lot to us. And that's why I'm so excited to introduce you to our newest sponsor, HelloFresh. HelloFresh allows you to choose between more than 100 recipes every single week, including cuisines from all all around the world and bigger portions that satisfy everyone. Over 35 of those weekly recipes are high protein recipes, which fires me up and it allows me to feel great because I know that I'm eating wholesome ingredients like sustainably sourced seafood and 100% antibiotic and hormone free chicken. And of course, most important of all is how it tastes. And let me tell you, it actually tastes really good. This helps me be a better business owner because I'm able to eat meals that taste good and help me feel satisfied. I don't have to spend as much time thinking or prepping each meal and I can make sure that I'm hitting my protein goals in the process. Go to hellofresh.com byt10fm to get 10 free meals plus a free Zwilling knife which is a $144.99 value on your third box. This offer is only valid while supplies last free meals applied at discount on your first box for new subscribers only and varies by plan. For the last few years I've been using Notion to basically organize my entire life. It's so much more than just a to do list app. It's truly a one stop shop for organizing any area of your life or business. And it's not just great at organization, it's also great at automations as well. There's so many complex things that you can do and build that can happen automatically and instantly within Notion. And now for the first time, they are introducing Notion AI agents. The new Notion Custom Agents will allow you to automatically perform advanced tasks without you even having to lift a finger. For example, I built a Notion Custom agent that automatically pulls the link to any reel that I have posted and then it pulls out the text that I say or the text on the screen in the first few seconds of the reel. Basically it pulls out my hook and then it's able to look at how that post performed and compare it to the hook which allows me to see which hooks are actually working so that I can reuse them and tweak them for future reels. Notion is an AI powered connected workspace for teams. Notion brings all of your notes, docs and projects into one space that just works. It's seamless, flexible, powerful, and with AI built in, you spend less time switching between different apps and tools and more time creating great work Work now with Notion's Custom Agents. Busy work that used to take hours or let's be honest, didn't really get done at all runs itself. The easiest way to think about the difference between a custom agent and normal AI is that normal AI requires you as the human to prompt it. But custom agents work for you 247 behind the scenes without you having to lift a finger. But don't just take my word for it. Notion is used by more than half of Fortune 500 companies and some of the fastest growing companies in the world, like OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Try custom agents now@notion.com byt that's all lowercase notion n o t I-O-N.com by t to try custom agents today and when you use my link, you're supporting our show again. Notion.comBYT Are you ready to take your business marketing to the next level? 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Get started for free today or use code TRIBE50 to get 50% off the starter and standard plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Just head to www.brevo.com tribe and take your marketing further with Brevo and Aura. And then on the other end of the spectrum there is the gap being too wide. Basically you've created too much curiosity, too much ambiguity, it's too confusing or too vague and so people aren't going to make that jump because they have no idea what the benefit or the reward is for making said jump they have no reason why they want to watch the rest of the reel because they're lost and confused in the first few seconds. So, again, the Curiosity Gap is one that you're going to have to play around with, and it's going to take some practice, just like all of these hooks, but this one especially is going to take some practice to get better at. But essentially what you're doing is you're creating an information gap that people feel like it needs to be closed. Here's the same hook three different ways, and you'll hear how the Curiosity Gap changes. Number one, this changed everything for me. That Curiosity Gap is just too wide because, yeah, I can understand that something changed something for you, but if I don't know who you are, if I don't already follow you, if I'm not already a fan, I don't know what your niche is, I don't really care to stick around and learn what changed what. It could be about anything, right? It could be this changed everything in my figure skating career. It could be this changed everything in my Pokemon card collection. I don't know what it's about because it's too vague. So that Curiosity Gap is too wide. On the other end of the spectrum, if my hook was creating a spreadsheet for my Pokemon cards changed everything in my collection challenge, I wouldn't want to watch the rest of the video because the Curiosity Gap is too small. There's such little information that is left out of that hook. I know what the rest of the reel is going to be about. The rest of the reel is going to be about creating a spreadsheet to track your Pokemon card collection. And if that's something I want to do, sure, I'll stick around. But if that's something I don't want to do, even though it's probably something I should do or something I would benefit from, I will scroll away. If instead I was in that sweet spot in that Goldilocks zone, I might say something like, this one thing changed everything about my Pokemon card collection. And. And after four years, I finally finished. These Curiosity Gap hooks create an open loop, which psychologically, our brains want to finish because there's that tension there, they want to close the loop. Hook template number four is outcome based. Hooks, like the name implies, you are leading with the outcome. So I might say something like, this reel got 2.1 million views. Here's why. If you're a fitness coach, you might say something like, my client put on 12 pounds of muscle in the last three months and here's how he did it without steroids. The more specific and concrete you can get in the proof or in the results that you're giving, the more likely people are to stick around and watch. And the results don't have to be something that is absolutely insane. It can actually be just as, if not more effective to use more relatable numbers that are more realistic, because then people want to stick around. If I say, here's how my client got 17 billion views on one of their videos, it might be interesting because it's like such a crazy high number, but a lot of my followers are probably going to scroll away because it's unrealistic, or at least they believe it's unrealistic for them. So using realistic numbers for this is totally fine. Hook idea number five is what I'm going to call the direct address hook. These hooks directly address or call out somebody by name. Basically, you are calling out the ideal viewer of this reel. You might say something like, if you're a mom of three under three, keep watching. Or if you're a solo entrepreneur trying to figure out Instagram, listen up. Or if you're scared to death of going into a rock climbing gym and you're over the age of 30, keep watching. When you get really specific in calling people out at the beginning of your video, the people who align with that are going to keep watching. They're going to lean in, and oftentimes the people who are slightly adjacent, or maybe even the people who are outside of that target audience, are still going to watch because they want to figure out if this is going to pertain to them, even though they don't exactly meet the demographics that you spelled out at the beginning. Idea number six is one of my favorite kind of hooks and one of the hooks that I think is going to be most effective effective moving forward, and that is storytelling based hooks. The one common denominator in storytelling based hooks is they use the word I. I almost quit blank last year. I was stuck at blank. I lost blank. Humans are hardwired for storytelling and we're hardwired to remember stories. In fact, one of my favorite facts is that stories are 22 times more memorable than facts. So if you want to make your reels more memorable, if you want to be top of people's minds and stand out, stop telling facts in your reels and start telling stories. Idea number seven are hook swap hooks. A hook swap hook is where you basically take an already existing viral video. Usually it's of something crazy happening, like someone throwing toilet paper out of an airplane, or a kid doing parkour and he's about to fall and hit the ground. And then you seamlessly transition from this viral intro that is doing a lot of the things that we've already talked about with a captivating visual that's grabbing people's attention and creating curiosity. And then you use what's called a match cut to seamlessly transition into your reel, where you're doing a talking head reel, where you're taking people through the home that you're a real estate agent for, or you're giving some fitness technique tip. Now, the key to these hook swap reels is what's called a match cut. And a match cut is a fancy editing term that basically means the image on the screen at the end of the first scene matches, or it's super similar to what's on the screen at the beginning of the second clip. So if you're using a hook swap of a toilet paper being thrown out of an airplane, then when that first scene ends and you see the toilet paper kind of falling out of the sky, you want the second clip to begin with the toilet paper finishing its fall. Maybe it's falling into your lap and you're catching it. Maybe it's falling out of the sky and it's hitting you in the head. Maybe it's falling out of the sky, landing on the ground, and there's some message written in the toilet paper. If you want to watch some examples. One of my favorite accounts that creates a lot of these hook swap reels is called Wants and Needs Brand and they're selling a gray sweatsuit, gray sweatpants, and a gray hoodie. No offense to them, but it's not like they've done anything revolutionary with their clothing brand in terms of the actual clothes, but they are crushing it on social media and thus crushing it in business because they consistently use these hook swaps to grab people's attention in a way to show off their clothing. By the way, if you want a free library of these hook swap videos, you can get one by dming me on Instagram. Just go to my Instagram profile, brock11johnson, and send me the word swap and I will send you the link to a library with over 40 of these hook swap videos that you can use for free on any of your future reels. Hook idea number eight is authority or D data backed hooks. Basically the title of the podcast that you're watching right now and the first sentence that I said in this podcast was exactly this. I told you how in order to make this video, I analyzed 1300 Instagram Reels. That's basically saying, don't trust me. Trust the data. And here's what the data says. You could also say, according to Blank, you could name some prominent figure or some prominent company, you could quote them, you could quote a study that you found. Basically, you're not relying on your own expertise. You're not telling people that they should trust you. You're saying, here's what this really trusted figure, this really well known person or company said. According to the World Health Organization, according to the fda, according to the White House, according to X study, according to Y data. Basically you're just giving some credibility to reduce the automatic skepticism that anyone is going to have, especially when they're a stranger and they're viewing one of your reels. Idea number nine is the bold claim hook. This is somewhat similar to hook idea number two, the contrarian hook. But basically in this one you're making a specifically bold claim and you're stating the whole claim in the hook itself. This is where you're going to make a strong declarative statement and the certainty that you have in this statement is going to signal your expertise. Now I will say, while every opinion on social media nowadays is an unpopular opinion and no matter what you say, people will be arguing if it is truly a bold claim that you're going to make, make sure that it is a hill that you are willing to die on. Make sure that it's something that you actually believe and something that you are ready to argue with people about in the comments or that you are willing to defend your point of view on. Speaking of point of view, hook idea number 10 is the relatable hook. And the relatable hook is the one that you see on memes. It's the ones that say when you or POV me when I da da da. Again, these usually work the best on memes. Funny content, simple content trends, but they can also be a great way to introduce a story that you're going to tell. When you use one of these relatable hooks, the mirror neurons in your viewers minds fire and they don't see you or imagine you in this scenario. They imagine themselves in this scenario. So it's a great way to create empathy and trust with your audience. Once again, speaking of POV, hook idea number 11 is quite literally POV hooks. And what I mean by point of view hooks is the video feels like it was filmed from the point of view of the viewer. These reels kind of create a voyeuristic effect where it can feel like you are actually in the scene and whatever is about to happen, you weren't supposed to know, or it's actually authentically happening. It wasn't scripted, it wasn't planned. It was just something that happened to be filmed by someone. One of the most effective ways to achieve this point of view look is by adding a piece of text that looks like it's the classic Snapchat text. A creator who does a really great job of this is Citizen the Artist, and he uses this style hook quite often to make an introduction to his own music videos. But at the beginning it feels like it was just filmed by an innocent bystander, filmed by someone across the street in their car or someone walking their dog who just happened to catch this moment. And then he uses a match cut, which again we talked about earlier, to seamlessly transition from this Snapchat point of view into his full music video. Hook idea number 12 is urgency or time bound hooks. Before you go to the gym today, do this in 2026. Before your head hits the pillow tonight, you need to basically the urgency around the time creates pressure and this pressure creates attention. Number 13 on the list is list hooks. List hooks are things like three ways to improve your bench press, five foods that you should avoid eating, two things you need to check the next time you go snowboarding. And basically these make your audience feel like there is structured value and predictable outcomes from your reel, which can feel a little bit more peaceful and easier to consume. Basically, people know what they're going to get and so they're more likely to watch the rest of the video. Idea number 14 is comparison hooks. Comparison hooks are all about showing a difference rather than just telling your audience about a difference. And it's a really easy thing to do on Instagram by putting up a photo or a video and saying me before, I did X, Y and Z me before walking 10k steps a day. And just that text alone implies and lets your audience know that there is probably going to be an after you started walking 10k steps a day. Another great way that you can do a comparison style hook is with a split screen where you have different visuals on the top and bottom. It's a visually interesting break the norm style hook because that's not what most reels are. Most reels are just a single video full screen, but now we have two splitting the screen. And if they're comparing or contrasting different lifestyles or different outcomes or before and afters, we're more likely to stop and compare ourselves. And finally, last but not least, the 15th hook idea that I have for you is identity hooks. Identity hooks are similar to the called out hooks that we talked about earlier, where you're saying, if you're a small business owner, keep watching. If you're a beginner snowboarder, keep watching. But instead, with these, you're not going to just use language that directly describes them like a small business owner, someone over the age of 30. You're going to talk about the way they identify. And what I mean by that is you're going to use words like this. Good snowboarders always do this. Lazy moms start their day like this. Disciplined entrepreneurs never do. This works on a psychological level because people will keep watching to either make sure that they align with the positive trait or make sure that they don't align with the negative trait. Thank you so much for watching today. I completely forgot to ask you to subscribe. So if you've watched this far in the video, make sure you hit subscribe because obviously you like videos about growing on social media. And as always, happy networking. Sam.