12 TikTok hook formulas that stop the scroll

Almost everything written about short-form video performance comes down to one number: how many people are still watching at three seconds. Everything you do after that point only matters to the people the hook kept. So the opening line is not a stylistic choice. It is the part of the video that decides how large an audience the rest of the video is allowed to have.

Hooks that work are not original. They are variations on a small number of shapes that create an open question fast enough to interrupt a scroll. Below are twelve of them, grouped by the job they do, with the kind of video each one actually suits.

Curiosity shapes

These create a gap between what the viewer knows and what they want to know. They are the most reliable shapes, and the easiest to ruin by never closing the loop.

1. 1The open loop. "I made one change to this recipe and it went from bland to the thing my flatmates now ask for." You have promised a specific answer and withheld it. Deliver it before the halfway point or the comments turn on you.
2. 2The unfinished number. "There are four settings on this camera that nobody touches. This is the third one." Starting mid-list implies context the viewer wants to catch up on.
3. 3The reveal-first cut. Show the finished result in frame one and say what it took. Works for anything with a visible before and after.
4. 4The withheld object. "This costs eleven pounds and it replaced a machine I paid three hundred for." Name the outcome, not the item.

Audience shapes

These do the opposite of casting a wide net. They tell most viewers to leave, which sounds like a bad idea until you remember that retention is measured against the people who stayed.

1. 1The direct callout. "If you have ever bought a domain at 2am, this is for you." Specific enough that the right person feels named.
2. 2The exclusion. "Skip this if you already track your macros." Filtering out the wrong viewer early protects your watch-time average.
3. 3The shared grievance. "Nobody warns you that the first month of freelancing is mostly admin." Recognition buys attention as effectively as curiosity does.

Tension shapes

1. 1The contradiction. "Drinking more water will not fix your skin." Pushing against a widely held belief buys the seconds it takes the viewer to check whether you are right. Only use it when you can actually back the claim.
2. 2The stakes. "This clause is why the deposit never comes back." Makes the cost of not knowing concrete.
3. 3The confession. "I lost about four hundred pounds of stock learning this." Cost paid up front reads as credibility rather than a pitch.

Instruction shapes

1. 1The compressed promise. "Three minutes, one pan, no chopping." Constraints are more persuasive than adjectives.
2. 2The correction. "You are holding it wrong, and it is why the edge tears." A tutorial framed as a fix rather than a lesson.

The three things that break a hook

• A wind-up. "Hey guys, so today I wanted to talk about..." spends the entire attention budget on nothing. Cut it in the edit if you cannot stop saying it.
• Audio-only delivery. A lot of short-form viewing starts muted. If the hook is not also on screen in the first frame, a chunk of your audience never receives it.
• A promise the video does not keep. This is the one that does long-term damage, because it teaches the recommendation system that people who watch your openings do not finish your videos.

How to pick between two hooks

Read both out loud. The one that sounds like something you would say to a friend beats the one that reads better on a page almost every time, because a scripted delivery is audible in the first two words and it reads as an ad.

A quick test: if the hook still makes sense with the rest of the video deleted, it is a statement, not a hook. A hook should leave something unresolved.