Direct
State the result or the claim in the first sentence.
We deleted our onboarding checklist. Activation went up.
When to use it. When the outcome is surprising on its own and you can back it up in the post.
Free tool
LinkedIn Hook Generator
Paste the idea behind your next post, pick a tone, and get opening lines that earn the click on “see more”. Each one comes with a short note on why it works. No account needed.
01The basics
What makes a LinkedIn hook work
The hook is the first line or two of your post, the part people see in the feed before they decide to expand it. Good ones share four traits.
- It fits above "see more"
- LinkedIn folds a post after two or three lines, and on a phone that is barely one sentence. Whatever you want the reader to know has to sit in that space. If your hook needs the second paragraph to make sense, it is a preamble.
- It is specific enough to be checked
- A number, a tool, a timeframe, a role, a decision. "We moved billing to a queue and lost two days of invoices" can only come from someone who did it. "Scaling is hard" could come from anyone, so readers treat it as noise.
- It makes a promise the post keeps
- A hook opens a question in the reader's head. The body has to answer it. When the opening teases a lesson the post never delivers, people learn to skip your name in the feed, which costs more than one quiet post.
- It is written for one kind of reader
- Pick the person you want to stop scrolling: a founder hiring a first engineer, a recruiter filling sales roles, a nurse moving into tech. Words they use every day pull them in. A hook aimed at everyone pulls in nobody.
02Formats
Five hook formats, with examples
These match the tones in the generator. The examples show the shape, so swap in details from your own work.
Story
Drop the reader into a specific moment, already in progress.
Friday, 6pm, and the client asked for the whole deck in Spanish by Monday.
When to use it. When something actually happened to you. Only tell stories that are true; colleagues will recognize the ones that are not.
Contrarian
Name a common belief in your field and say where it breaks.
Cold email still works. Sending 2,000 of them a week is what stopped working.
When to use it. When you hold a position you can defend with reasons. Disagreeing for attention reads as exactly that.
Data-led
Lead with a number the reader can picture.
[N] of our last [N] lost deals died at the same step: legal review.
When to use it. When you have a real figure from your own work. The generator leaves brackets for numbers you did not provide, so you fill in the true one.
Question
Ask the exact question your reader has typed into a search bar this month.
How do you price a retainer when the scope changes every week?
When to use it. When the post answers it. Avoid yes or no questions and anything that starts with "Have you ever".
Mistakes that bury a good post
- Opening with "I am excited to announce" or "Happy Monday". The first line is the only line most people read, and a greeting spends it on nothing.
- Explaining context before the point. Put the point first and the context second.
- Stacking hashtags, emojis or a wall of line breaks to look busy. They push the actual hook below the fold.
- Borrowing a viral template word for word. Readers have seen "Unpopular opinion:" a thousand times this year.
- Promising a list of ten things and delivering three. The hook sets the bar the rest of the post is judged against.
How to use what you get
- 01Pick the hook that makes you want to write the post, not the one that sounds the cleverest.
- 02Rewrite it in the words you would use out loud. A hook that does not sound like you will make the rest of the post feel borrowed.
- 03Replace every bracket with a real number, or drop the line.
- 04Write the body, then reread the hook. If the post drifted, fix the hook so it matches what you actually said.
If you want the full post written from your notes, see what HireSteward does or compare plans and pricing. You can start a 7-day free trial without a card.
Questions
Questions about the hook generator
Your first post can go out this week.
Start a 7-day free trial, connect LinkedIn or X, and read the first drafts before anything is published.