We are defeating the purpose.

I think a lot of us accidentally started writing Instagram hooks for a grid instead of a person. And once you notice it, it explains some very weird stuff… including why so many hooks stop people for half a second and then do absolutely nothing else.

Hooks matter. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But if you want posts that get saved and sent around, the question you ask before you write that first line has to change a little.

Are we writing Instagram hooks for the algorithm or for people?

For years the questions have been: Will this stop the scroll? Is the cover strong enough? Does the first line create enough curiosity? Will someone who knows absolutely NOTHING about me want to open this?

They’re all useful questions, by the way. I still ask them.

But somewhere along the way “getting discovered” became such a massive part of the conversation that we forgot to think about what happens AFTER someone discovers the bloody thing.

The grid doesn’t save your post. The Explore page doesn’t send it to a friend. A person does that. A person who was probably half watching Netflix and deciding whether to get up for more chocolate.

When you write only for the stranger scrolling at speed, you end up with hooks that are very good at one moment, the stop, and not very interested in anything that comes after it. Someone stops, reads the cover, gets their tiny hit of curiosity… and then the slides inside don’t give them anything worth holding on to.

So they move on. And honestly, fair enough.

What makes someone share an Instagram post?

Imagine someone sitting on their couch, scrolling. They see your post and immediately think of Helen.

So they send it to Helen.

Helen opens it, because apparently the two of them have been discussing this exact thing for six months. She sends it to someone else. Maybe she checks your profile. Maybe she follows you. (And if she does go to your profile, that’s where the rest of your account has to carry on the conversation. I wrote about that in Instagram Profile Not Converting? Check This First.)

That entire little chain started because the post meant enough to ONE person that they wanted another human involved in it.

And I find that absolutely f*cking beautiful. That’s what social media was supposed to be about in the first place. One person on a couch going “oh, Helen NEEDS to see this.”

When people send something, it’s very rarely because the first line was clever. They send it because the post explained something better than they could have explained it themselves. Or because it finally put words to the thing they’ve been trying to tell their business partner for a year.

The hook got them in. What was inside is what got sent.

How do I write a hook that gets shared, not just seen?

This one changed a lot for me. Instead of only asking “how do I make a stranger stop?”, I started asking:

“What would make the RIGHT person care enough to do something with this?”

And “do something” can look different every time. They save it because they’ll need it later. They send it because it says the thing better than they could. They follow because they want more of THIS conversation. They tap through to your profile because they’re curious about what else you know.

Every one of those needs the hook to make a promise the rest of the post actually keeps.

So now, before I write a hook, I try to picture the person who would send it. Who is the Helen of this post? A business owner sending it to their co-founder. Someone sending it to the friend who keeps saying they’ll start posting “next month.” Someone sending it to themselves, which yes, people do. I do it about 12 times a week.

If I can’t picture anyone sending it to anyone, I go back to the idea before I touch the hook.

Once I know who it’s for, the hook has a much simpler job. It just has to name something that specific person would recognise straight away. “We keep blaming the wrong person” works for my audience because a lot of them have been blaming themselves for the content plan they keep abandoning. They recognise it in five words and they want to know who the right person is.

That’s all it has to do. Open the door for the right human and let the slides do the rest.

Do hooks still matter on Instagram?

Look, I’m not saying hooks suddenly don’t matter and we should all start making beige educational PDFs and manifesting shares 😂

Packaging STILL matters. Big time. I’m a graphic designer, I care about covers and first slides more than is probably healthy. A big part of how I rebuilt my account was carousels, and I got 40K new followers in 8 months from carousels alone. The cover of every single one of those was doing serious work.

But packaging is supposed to get someone INTO the idea. It cannot BE the entire idea.

When the hook is the whole idea, you get that very specific disappointment of opening a carousel with an incredible first slide and finding… a list of five things you’ve read 200 times. You feel a little bit tricked. You definitely don’t send that to anyone. If anything, you scroll slightly faster the next time that account turns up in your feed.

And that’s the cost nobody counts. One hook that overpromises might get you a decent number on that post. It also teaches people that your covers write cheques your slides can’t cash.

Why do the same hooks stop working?

Maybe that’s why copying whatever appears to be working gets old so bloody quickly.

If everyone is using the same hook, same visual, same framing and same five “pattern interrupts,” eventually none of it interrupts anything. It becomes a norm we get very good at ignoring.

You know the ones. “Stop doing this if you want to grow.” “Nobody is talking about this.” Big bold font and a shocked face. They worked once because they were different. Now your thumb has skipped past them before your brain has finished reading the words.

A hook that someone actually stops for usually sounds like it came from inside your work. From a client conversation, or the thing you’ve explained 40 times this year. Nobody else can write that one for you, which is exactly why it still works.

What to do before you write your next hook

Next time you sit down to make a post, try this order:

• Write one sentence on who would send this post and who they’d send it to. Be specific. “Business owners” is not a person.
• Write the idea before the hook. If you can’t say what the post gives someone in two lines, leave the cover alone for now.
• Write the hook so it names the thing that person would recognise, in their words and their situation.
• Read your first slide and your last slide together. Does the end keep the promise the start made?
• Open your insights and look at the posts with the most sends and saves. What were they actually giving people?
• Ask yourself honestly: would I put this in a friend’s DMs? If not, fix the inside before you touch the hook.

I’d much rather make something one person feels compelled to put in someone else’s DMs than something 40,000 strangers stop for and forget.

Thoughts?

Want your carousels to get sent, not just seen?

This is a big part of what I teach in The Carousel Studio. Carousels are where I learnt most of this, because a carousel is a hook with a whole post attached to it. If the cover promises something the slides don’t deliver, people feel it straight away.

Inside there are 29 self-paced lessons on writing the hook, structuring the slides so the idea actually lands, and designing the whole thing so it’s easy to read. You get lifetime access, so you can go at whatever pace your week allows.

If you’d like your next carousel to end up in somebody’s chat with Helen, have a look at The Carousel Studio.