If you missed Part I or Part II of our amazing LinkedIn masterclass series with Mark Jung, Co-Founder of Authority—and #1 LinkedIn creator in Canada!—please pause immediately and go check them out.

Seriously—there's so much good foundational info from Mark about how to create the perfect LinkedIn post and how to use a content matrix to come up with your very own unique content!

In the final session, Mark and Kelly Cheng, Goldcast's Head of Marketing, discussed why video is a critical part of a strong LinkedIn content strategy. Mark also showed us plenty of examples of great videos and taught us how to write solid hooks!

The major takeaways you'll read today are:

• 6 types of hooks for your video content
• 8 ways to create powerful video hooks!
• Reminder: Existing video clips work just as well at net new
• Work on your hooks and leave the rest to Goldcast Content Lab

Plus, you can watch the full session on demand below!

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Your hook is exactly what it sounds like: the thing that grabs your audience's attention and holds it.

You should be spending 80% of your time on your hook because it's the thing that matters most. After all, if you create the coolest, most thoughtful content in the world, it won't matter if everyone scrolls right past it!

Hooks can be text, GIFs, images, or—you guessed it—video!

Before we talk about how to create powerful hooks, let's quickly run down the list of types of hooks:

1. Composition: Use vertical videos that are 800x999. If you have a horizontal video, put it on a vertical template and re-render it.
2. Physical: Position yourself to take up 80% of the frame. Move around, make eye contact, and take up space! Give people something to look at.
3. Audio: Take a note from TikTok and use audio to stop people mid-scroll and grab attention. Note that what you're talking about in your audio clip should be different from the text hook of your post.
4. Contrast hook: Show contrast with your environment and the colors you choose for emojis and text, but don't overwhelm viewers with a crowded, busy background.
5. Subtitle hook: Don't forget about color, contrast, and movement in your subtitles too! This is one more opportunity to stop the scroll, so take advantage of it. (If you've ever seen videos with bright text boxes, you know what we're talking about here.)
6. Social trust: There's a reason why doctors in videos wear lab coats, and physical trainers show off their physique. Think about the cues that can build social trust into your content and look professional for your specific industry.

Now that you know the different types of hooks that you can use in your video, next we'll talk about tangible ways you can make your video content infinitely more powerful.

Again, we gotta hook people if we want to succeed.

Here are eight ways to improve your hooks:

We touched on contrast a little above, and you may remember Mark talking about it from the first sessions as well.

Contrast creates interest in your video. Whether it's the contrast you create with your background, your audio hook, your text hook, your visual hook, or even your POV by contrasting two things, you need some sort of contrast.

Check out this post for a great example:

As you can see, Jen's hook has contrast. Ugly + baby = say what? Then she follows that with her re-hook: "Why?" which is a natural curiosity starter and makes us want to click to learn why cold email has this aforementioned "ugly baby" issue.

You can also see that Jen is physically taking up about 80% of the frame, and she's moving her hands around to provide contrast in the video. Her background does provide some contrast, but it's also not overwhelming and cluttered, so we're able to focus on her as she speaks.

You should work in power words whenever possible. Rather than saying something is "interesting" or "fascinating," call it "genius!"

Find a way to dial things up to 11 because in a world where people constantly play it safe, that will help you stand out. You want to use exaggerations and expressions in a way that gets people's attention.

Many B2B brands think they need to flex how intelligent they are by using jargon and acronyms, but you actually need to do the opposite. Dial down the big words! Write to about an eighth-grade comprehension level for best results (you can use the Hemingway app to check your content, and obviously this does depend on industry).

Simplicity is a superpower. Use it to your advantage!

This one's super easy. You can start doing it as soon as your next post! Simply call out exactly who you're speaking to, and use the word "you" in the first sentence or two.

Why?

A YouTube study revealed that using the word "you" (or variations like "y'all") can lead to 66% more views on your video content. That's huge! (And the number was even higher when people said "you" twice in the first few sentences—97%!)

Look back through some of your recent LinkedIn posts and play around with how you might work "you" into the first sentence or two. Then, give it a try next time you post and see if you have good results.

If you look at the point above, we asked the question, "Why?" in the middle of the paragraph. Hopefully, that made you want to keep reading.

If it worked, that's because it played on your curiosity as a reader. Your audience will have that same curiosity as they read your content, so bring in ways to move them forward and keep them around with hooks like "why" or creating some mystery in your content.

Mark often starts his videos with his hands up in the air—the universal sign for "Stop! Pay attention to me!"

When someone is gesturing to get your attention like that, you're likely going to stop and find out what they want, right?

When you start your videos with a wave or a gesture, you're psychologically priming your audience to pay attention to you. You want to give people something to anchor to; it's the same reason Mark breaks up his text content with emojis and shorter sentences—so people can stay focused.

Be very specific about what you're going to teach or what you're asking of your audience.

For example: "In just 40 seconds, I'm going to show you a new way to use ChatGPT."

That's great! It's super specific, and that makes it interesting. It's also more believable when you get specific; for example, sharing a 7.5 rating (versus a 10/10) just seems more realistic to your audience. They're going to be suspicious of general numbers that don't seem legit.

When you think about what you're trying to convey to your audience, be the painkiller—not the vitamin.

That might sound counterintuitive for those of us who want to talk only about the positive things, which is understandable. Who doesn't want to help their customers increase their ROI, make more money, or any other number of positive things?

The truth is that most people don't care about what you're adding to their lives. They care about the problems you're taking away.

Take Content Lab as an example. You don't want to be in the editing studio late at night, rewatching videos and adding captions and emojis.

Content Lab enters the picture, and the Goldcast team posts letting everyone know that with this tool, you can eradicate that problem entirely.

Now you definitely want to know more!

PS: If you really do want to learn more, click below and let's chat 😉

LEARN ABOUT CONTENT LAB

Finally, be sure you're building products to meet your customers where they currently live. This comes from deeply understanding your audience and the elements we talked about in the content matrix: your enemy, your "why," your core pillars.

For Mark's work at Authority, his audience is currently spending almost an hour writing and editing a LinkedIn post—only to share it and get little to no engagement.

That's discouraging!

But then Authority comes in with a painkiller for that problem, and they're speaking to an issue that the audience currently has. They aren't marketing a solution to a problem that doesn't exist yet, or that the audience isn't aware of. This is why it works. 

We've talked a lot here about creating net new video, but don't overlook the value of your existing videos! You can go a long way just by repurposing what you already have: meeting recordings, webinars, events, conferences, etc.

Here at Goldcast, we're making it much less painful to repurpose videos and create awesome content with Content Lab.

You don't have to be a video expert or take an editing course to learn how to use Content Lab. It's an intuitive, easy-to-use tool—and you can use it up to an hour a month, absolutely free! Ready to try it for yourself? Sign up below!

TRY CONTENT LAB

Since you need to spend 80% of your time working on your hooks, that doesn't leave a lot of time left to work on video content.

This seems like a big problem, no?

Lucky for you, Content Lab is here to help. With our AI-powered repurposing tool, you can turn any video or event—created with literally any tool out there—into a multimodal asset in just a few clicks. We hope you'll give it a whirl and let us know what ya think!

And don't forget to watch the full recording to see some awesome examples of stellar video hooks! We can't wait to see the amazing LinkedIn content you create after getting up to speed with Mark's tips.

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