Hey,
Before we get into it: I went down a bit of a rabbit hole the past few months. I pulled 131 hooks from 21 creators who are actually growing right now, different industries, different voices, and went looking for what they had in common.
Turns out it's only five things. Five formats that keep showing up. That's the whole issue today.
But before I get to those,
When I was building this skill, I entered into a technical issue.
The character amounts I was seeing recommended online didn’t always work
But after doing some research LinkedIn doesn't count your characters. It measures pixels. A capital W is about four times wider than a capital I,
so a line of "WWWW" gets cut off way sooner than a line of "IIII," even at the exact same character count.
27 characters of a different width letter
Which means two posts can have identical character counts and land in completely different spots.
What you've really got is a pixel budget. Roughly 110 width units per line on mobile before it wraps. Write to the space, not the count.
You think your hook is too long. It's actually the wrong width.
Reason why you shouldn’t base yourself on what you get from your AI tool or by counting characters, I always recommend using a tool like Kleo’s free formatting tool to see how it looks like:
Soooooo,
Your hook is doing two jobs at once. It's pulling in the human scrolling past, and it's telling the algorithm whether this is worth pushing to anyone else.
LinkedIn's new model (360Brew) reads your first 40 to 50 words before it decides to show your post at all. So a good hook wins both the reader and the reach.
A bad one loses both. Nobody clicks, and nobody else even gets the chance to.
Okay. The five formats. I'll show you a real one for each, then break down why it works.
1. Dense
This is when you fill every bit of space before the cutoff with one solid block of text, no line breaks. You use it when your hook needs context to make sense, like a stat or a story setup. The trick is giving just enough tension that they feel the stakes, but not enough that they can scroll past satisfied. They have to tap to get the rest.
2. Punchy + context
Short, hard first line. Then a blank line. Then a second line that twists it or leaves you hanging. That white space in the middle is doing real work, it makes your eye stop and lets the first line land. The first line tells them the what. The second line opens up the gap between what they're expecting and what you're about to say. This is the one I'd start with if you only learn one. Highest hit rate by far.
3. Single-line bomb
One sentence. No setup, no second line. It carries all the tension by itself. This is the riskiest of the bunch, because you're spending your whole hook on one line, and if it doesn't land, the post is gone. Only reach for it when you can feel in your gut that the line is a bomb. Quick technical note: you have to manually add a couple line breaks underneath it, or your next sentence gets pulled up onto the same line and the whole effect falls apart.
4. Stacked
Two to three short lines stacked on top of each other with the same shape. Before and after, numbers climbing, doubts you used to have. Your brain clocks the pattern, finishes the rhythm on its own, and gets curious about the payoff. The catch is that every line has to belong to the same series. The second a line feels random, the pattern breaks and so does the hook.
5. Hybrid
Get comfortable with the four first, then start bending the rules.
Here's the thread running through all five: every one of them opens a gap between what the reader expects and what you're claiming. That gap is the curiosity. The curiosity is what gets the click. If your hook doesn't crack one open, no format is going to save it.
One last thing, and this one changed how I write.
Stop trying to write the hook first.
Write the whole post, then go digging for the hook inside it. You don't make a hook up. You find the line that's already in there doing the heavy lifting.
So this week, pull up your last post and hunt for it. The one line that actually makes someone stop. The sharpest thing you said the whole way through. Drag that to the top.
And if you read back through and there's nothing in there worth pulling? The problem was never your opening. It was the post.
So write something worth reading first. Then go find the hook inside it.
Not the other way around.
Talk soon,
D.
P.S. I built a free Claude skill that writes hooks in all five formats for whatever draft you paste in.
P.P.S. If you'd rather see all of this on screen (the pixel demo, every example, the whole thing), I broke it down on video here.