You will be able to test hooks for three ideas and pick the strongest one for each.
Priya is a tutor who posts under three pillars: teaching, opinions and people. To practise hooks, she took one idea from each pillar, wrote five hooks per idea and read them aloud to two parents at pickup.
The earlier lessons covered what a hook has to do, five patterns you can reuse, and how the picture, the on-screen text and the spoken line fit together. Understanding hooks is easy compared with getting good at them. You get good by writing a lot of them, trying them on real people and paying attention to which ones make a listener lean in. Allow roughly half an hour to write, then a short session filming on your phone.
Open the backlog you built in lesson 2.4, "Write your pillars and twenty post ideas". Pick three ideas and take each one from a different pillar, so you practise on three different kinds of post. Make sure at least one is an idea you really want to film, because you'll film its opening before you finish.
From her teaching pillar, Priya took "How to tell in two minutes whether your child understood a maths topic". From her opinions pillar she took "Why I tell some parents their child does not need tuition". From her people pillar she took "What a Saturday morning class actually looks like".
Give every idea five hooks, and finish all five before you decide which ones you like. Your first attempt will usually be the most obvious line, and every other account is already posting the obvious line. Stronger hooks tend to turn up on the third or fourth try, after the obvious ones are used up.
Begin with the five patterns from lesson 3.2, "Hook patterns you can reuse for any idea": call out the viewer, open on the mistake or the result, state an opinion, ask their question, and promise something specific. You don't need to use each pattern exactly once. Drawing on several of them pushes you to come at the idea from different angles. For her first idea, Priya wrote:
"If your child says I understand but gets it wrong in the test." (call out the viewer) "Ask your child this one question after homework tonight." "Most parents check the answer and skip the working." (opinion) "How do you know if your child really understood today's lesson?" (question) "A two-minute check that shows whether your child understood a topic." (specific promise)
Across her three ideas that came to fifteen hooks. Your total will also be fifteen.
A hook is only a guess until someone hears it. Choose two testers who are as close to your buyer as you can manage, such as a customer you get on well with, a friend in the same situation, or a colleague's spouse. Read them one hook at a time, and after each one ask whether they would keep watching.
Watch their faces as closely as you listen to their answers. Most people are polite, and plenty will say yes to every hook. A real yes tends to come with a reaction, such as a nod, a "huh" or a follow-up question. A polite yes comes with nothing. Write down which kind of yes each hook got.
When Priya read hers to two parents at pickup, both reacted to "Most parents check the answer and skip the working", and one said "That's me." The question version drew only polite nods. She chose the opinion version as the winner.
For each idea, take the two hooks that tested best and film only the first three seconds of each. All you need is the first frame, the on-screen text and the first spoken line, lined up as shown in lesson 3.3. You don't need to film the rest of the video.
Play the openings back on your phone with the sound off, because that is how most viewers will come across them. Check whether each one makes sense without sound and whether you would stop scrolling for it. If you can, show them to one of your testers as well. Then choose a winner for each idea.
Filming openings feels slow the first time. It's still the quickest way to find out whether a hook that sounded good in your head holds up in a feed, and it's practice for module five, "Film and edit on your phone". The openings don't need to be polished. Each one has to work on mute and make someone want to see the rest.
A swipe file is a running collection of hooks you've written, tested or come across. You keep it so that each new idea starts faster. Put all fifteen hooks from this exercise into it, with a note on which ones won and why. If you keep it in a spreadsheet, use these columns: the hook, the idea it was for, the pattern, how it tested, and whether you used it.
Keep adding to it. When a hook in your own feed stops you, save it with the account name so you can study its pattern later. After a few months the file will hold more good openings than you could come up with on any single evening, and working from it will make you quicker at writing hooks.
You're finished when you have three ideas, five written hooks for each, notes from testing them on two people, a short filmed opening for each idea's winner, and a swipe file that holds all of it.
Now do the full set for your own three ideas: write five hooks each, test them on two people, and film the first three seconds of the winner for each.
Write five hooks for each of three ideas, test them on two people, and film the first three seconds of the winning hook for each idea.
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