What is Hook?
A hook is the opening few seconds of a video or the first line of a post, written to give someone a reason to keep watching or reading instead of scrolling on.
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A hook does one of a small number of jobs: it states the payoff, it opens a question the viewer wants closed, or it contradicts something the viewer believes. What it does not do is introduce you, thank people for clicking, or explain what the video will cover before anything happens.
This is the highest-leverage part of the edit because the audience is largest there. On short-form, the drop-off in the first three seconds is steeper than anywhere else in the clip, so a weak first line caps the ceiling of everything that follows no matter how good the body is.
Write the hook last, once you know what the strongest moment in the piece actually is, and consider leading with that moment rather than building to it. Then check the retention graph: a cliff in the opening seconds is a hook problem, while a steady decline afterwards is a pacing problem.
Where Hook shows up
You will meet Hook most often while comparing ai writing tools - Jasper, Copy.ai, Writesonic, and Surfer AI all deal with it, though not in the same way or at the same price.