You will produce tested hooks for three ideas and pick the strongest for each.
You now know what a hook has to do, five patterns for writing one, and how to line up the picture, text and spoken line. Knowing is the easy part. The skill comes from writing many hooks, testing them on real people and noticing which ones make someone lean in.
This exercise takes about half an hour of writing and a short session with your phone. At the end you will have chosen and filmed hooks for three ideas from your backlog, and you will have the start of a file that makes every future hook faster.
Open your backlog from lesson 2.4, Write your pillars and twenty post ideas, and pick three ideas. Choose them from different pillars, so you practise on different kinds of post. At least one should be an idea you are genuinely excited to film, because you will be filming its opening by the end.
Priya chose three: "How to tell in two minutes whether your child understood a maths topic" from her teaching pillar, "Why I tell some parents their child does not need tuition" from her opinions, and "What a Saturday morning class actually looks like" from her people pillar.
For each idea, write five hooks before choosing any. The first hook you write is usually the most obvious one, and the obvious one is the version every other account already uses. The better versions tend to appear around the third or fourth attempt, once the obvious ideas are out of the way.
Use the five patterns from lesson 3.2, Hook patterns you can reuse for any idea, as a starting point: call out the viewer, open on the mistake or the result, state an opinion, ask their question, and promise something specific. You do not have to use each pattern exactly once, but using several forces you to approach the idea from different directions.
For her first idea, Priya wrote these, as an example. "If your child says I understand but gets it wrong in the test." "Ask your child this one question after homework tonight." "Most parents check the answer and skip the working." "How do you know if your child really understood today's lesson?" "A two-minute check that shows whether your child understood a topic." That gave her fifteen hooks across the three ideas.
Hooks are guesses until someone hears them. Find two people who are like your buyer, or as close as you can get: a customer you are on good terms with, a friend in the same situation, a colleague's spouse. Read each hook to them, one at a time, and ask a single question: would you keep watching?
Watch their face as much as you listen to the answer. People are polite, and many will say yes to everything. A real yes usually comes with a reaction, a nod, a "huh", or a follow-up question. A polite yes comes with nothing.
Priya tested hers on 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 got polite nods. The opinion version won.
For each idea, take the two strongest hooks from your test and film just the opening of each. You do not need the full video, only the first frame, the on-screen text and the first spoken line, lined up as in lesson 3.3.
Then watch both on your phone with the sound off, the way most viewers will meet them. Ask which one makes sense without sound and which one you would stop for. Show them to one of your testers if you can. Pick the winner for each idea.
Filming the openings will feel slow the first time. It is the fastest way to find out whether a hook that sounded good in your head still works in a feed, and it is good practice for module five, Film and edit on your phone.
Last, start your swipe file. A swipe file is a running collection of hooks you have written, tested or seen, kept so future ideas start faster. Make it now and put all fifteen hooks in it, with a note on which ones won and why.
If you keep it in a sheet, give it these columns: the hook, the idea it was for, the pattern, how it tested, and whether you used it. Add hooks you see in your feed that stop you, too, with the account name, so you can study the pattern later. After a few months this file will hold more good openings than you could think of on any single evening.
You should finish with three ideas, five written hooks for each, notes from testing them on two people, a short filmed opening for the winner of each idea, and a swipe file holding everything. The filmed openings do not need to be polished. They need to work on mute and make someone want to see the rest.
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 each for three ideas, test them on two people, and film the first three seconds of the winner for each idea.
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