How to Write LinkedIn Hooks That Get Read

On LinkedIn, the feed shows the first line or two of your post and then a "see more" link. So your opening line isn't part of your post. It is your post, as far as most people scrolling are concerned. If it doesn't make them stop, nothing else you wrote matters.

The mistake most people make is warming up. They start with context, a date, a "I've been thinking about," a polite throat-clear. By the time they reach the interesting part, the reader has scrolled on. The fix is to cut the warm-up and open with the part that earns attention. Here are eight patterns that do that, each with a weak version and a sharper one.

The patterns

1. The contrarian take. Say the thing most people in your field would push back on. Disagreement makes people stop to see if you're right.

• Before: "Here are some thoughts on cold email."
• After: "Most cold email advice makes your emails worse."

2. The mistake. Name a mistake the reader is probably making. People are wired to check whether they're the one doing it wrong.

• Before: "Tips for pricing your services."
• After: "The way you're pricing small jobs is costing you money."

3. The result. Lead with the outcome, then make them read on to find out how. Specific beats vague every time.

• Before: "We had a good month and learned a lot."
• After: "We cut our project timeline in half and the client didn't pay a cent more."

4. The number list. Tell them exactly how much is coming and that it's worth their time. The promise of a finite, useful list is hard to scroll past.

• Before: "Some things I wish I'd known earlier."
• After: "Seven things I'd tell anyone starting out, ranked by how much they hurt to learn."

5. The question that hits a nerve. Ask the thing your reader is privately worried about. Not a soft rhetorical question, a real one.

• Before: "Do you ever feel busy but not productive?"
• After: "Why does your calendar look full and your bank account look empty?"

6. The confession. Admit something true and slightly uncomfortable. Honesty is rare in the feed, so it stands out.

• Before: "I've grown a lot as a founder."
• After: "I almost shut the business down last year, and I never told anyone why."

7. The "stop doing X." A direct instruction reads as confidence and implies you know something the reader doesn't.

• Before: "It might be worth reconsidering long sales decks."
• After: "Stop sending sales decks. They're killing your deals."

8. The specific moment. Drop the reader into a scene with a real detail. A concrete moment beats an abstract claim.

• Before: "Client feedback can be tough to hear."
• After: "A client called me at 7am to tell me our work was \"fine.\" That word ruined my week."

What every good hook has in common

Look across those examples and you'll see the same things doing the work. A strong hook is short, so it fits before the cutoff. It's specific, so it feels real instead of generic. And it opens a gap, a question in the reader's head that only the rest of the post can close.

That gap is the whole trick. "We had a good month" closes the loop in the first line, so there's no reason to read on. "We cut our timeline in half and the client didn't pay more" leaves you wanting to know how. Always leave them wanting the how.

Common ways hooks fail

• Burying the lede. The good line is in paragraph three. Move it to the top and delete everything above it.
• Hedging. "I think maybe sometimes it could be worth..." Pick a position and say it plainly. You can add nuance later in the post.
• Vagueness. "Some things I learned." Which things? Be concrete enough that someone could disagree.
• Front-loading context. Dates, backstory, and setup belong after the hook, not before it.

How to practice

Take a post you've already written, or one a tool drafted for you, and rewrite just the first line five different ways using the patterns above. Read each one as if it were the only thing you'd ever see of that post. Keep the one that makes you want to tap "see more." This takes two minutes and does more for your reach than anything else you can change.

If you're drafting a lot of posts from your own website, a tool like RightHandMan.io will give you a first-draft hook for each page, but the patterns here are how you make them yours. The draft gets you started. The first line is where you earn the read.