Guide
A Reel opening is read before it is heard. Write it muted
Reels get pushed to people who do not follow you, arrive with the volume off, and are judged in the time a thumb takes to move. Below are twenty written openings to adapt, and the four things that make a Reels hook different from a hook anywhere else.
- Written openings below, across two kinds of business
- 20
- The window an opening has to survive
- 3 sec
- What three seconds of normal speech actually fits
- 8 words
Four things that are specific to Reels
Reels are surfaced to strangers more aggressively than they are shown to your own followers, so the opening is usually being read by somebody with no context about you at all. Assume nothing is known and nothing is owed.
Most of them arrive muted. Whatever you say in the first second has to also be on screen in the first second, or as far as most of your sample is concerned it did not happen. This is the biggest single difference from a video somebody chose to press play on.
The frame is covered in more places than you expect. The profile row, the caption and the button column all sit over the picture, so an opening line placed near the bottom is an opening line half hidden behind interface.
And the first frame keeps working after the fact. A Reel lives on in a grid, where frame one is a thumbnail. A first frame that catches you mid-blink is a thumbnail nobody taps a month later.
- Written for a stranger, not for somebody who already follows you.
- On screen in the first second, not only spoken.
- Kept clear of the top and bottom bands where the interface sits.
- A first frame you would be happy to see sitting in your grid.
The same video, opened two ways
The left column is what gets recorded. The right column is what survives a muted feed.
| Spoken preamble | Payoff, said and shown | |
|---|---|---|
| Salon | Hi everyone, quick tip today | Your colour fades in three weeks. It is not the dye |
| Skincare | Let me tell you about this product | I stopped using half of my routine |
| Coach | Some thoughts on burnout | I took two clients off my roster and earned more |
| Restaurant | Come with us to work today | This is what we bin before lunch |
Ten openings for services, trades and local businesses
These are written as spoken lines rather than captions, because you should be able to say each one without your face changing. Take the mechanic and put your own numbers in. A hook borrowed word for word from another business reads as borrowed, and viewers are very good at hearing it.
Every one of them states something inside the first breath. None of them introduce a topic, thank anybody, or say the word welcome. That is the only rule all twenty share.
Read them out loud before you pick. The one that makes you wince is the one that was written rather than spoken, and a viewer hears that in the cadence even when they could not name what was wrong.
- Your quote was not too expensive. It arrived four days late.
- We charge more than the shop down the road, and here is the part they leave out.
- This bathroom took nine days and seven of them were waiting for one part.
- Nobody tells you what a deposit is actually protecting, so here it is.
- Your colour fades in three weeks and it is almost never the dye.
- I let a client go last month and my revenue went up.
- The cheapest job I ever quoted ended up costing me two thousand pounds.
- If your booking form asks nine questions, that is why nobody finishes it.
- The same question came in twice today, so I am answering it here.
- This is the repair we get called out for most, and it takes four minutes.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Ten more for products, coaching and anything sold online
The second ten lean harder on admission and specificity, because a product feed is where category language does the most damage. Nobody scrolls past a competitor's ad and thinks about your adjectives.
Notice how many of them start on a flaw. A confession spends nothing and buys the credibility that every later claim in the video draws on. It is also the fastest way to stop sounding like a brand account.
Swap the nouns and keep the shape. If a line needs a number, use the real one, because an invented number is the thing that comes back to you in the comments.
- I have used this every day for a year and here is what broke first.
- This is the most expensive one on the shelf. I still buy it, for one reason.
- Two of the four steps on the box do nothing at all.
- We sold out in a day and it was the worst thing that happened to us.
- The version most people buy is not the version I would buy.
- My best month came from the offer I nearly deleted.
- If you already post every day, this will not help you.
- I spent nine thousand on a launch and made two sales.
- Everybody says to niche down. That advice cost me a year.
- Read the second ingredient before you read the front of the label.
How to choose which ones to record, and how to read the result
Write more than you will use. Ten openings take twenty minutes with a pen and cost nothing, and the tenth is usually better than the first because the obvious ones are out of the way by then.
Record them back to back against the same body. Same shirt, same light, same argument, different first three seconds. That is the only way to learn which opening did the work rather than which Tuesday did.
If you want the patterns underneath these lines rather than the lines themselves, /video-hook-generator lists eight of them with a worked example each, and it drafts an opening headline out of the transcript of a take you have already recorded.
Then judge on the retention graph rather than on how it felt to say. The opening you were least comfortable with wins often enough that it is worth noticing when it does.
One trap to avoid: do not test six variations of the same mechanic. Six versions of the same contradiction give you six similar numbers and one wasted week. Spread across shapes and the spread is the information you paid for.
Six openings should cost roughly what one used to
The reason most people test one opening instead of six is not the writing. It is that six openings means six edits, and six edits is an evening nobody has after a full day.
Cutroom collapses that step. Record the openings back to back, upload the take, and it transcribes every word, cuts the silence, places b-roll on the words you highlight, and burns word-timed captions in one of six styles into a finished 9:16 MP4. The batch is 100 credits and the export is 20 credits an output minute. The first three are free in your first seven days, with 600 credits and no card, and on Lite at $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits the sixth variant costs the same as the first.
The honest limits before you plan around it: somebody has to be on camera, three minutes is the ceiling on the source take, the output is vertical MP4 only, and there is no subtitle file to hand anybody afterwards.
And the twenty lines above still have to be rewritten with your own numbers in them. The specifics are the entire reason they work, and that part is a kitchen table with a pen.
Questions people ask
- How long should a Reels hook be?
- About three seconds, which is seven or eight spoken words at a natural pace. The constraint is doing you a favour: almost every weak opening improves when you are forced to cut it, because the padding goes first.
- Should the hook be spoken or written on screen?
- Both, at the same time. Most Reels viewers arrive muted, so the on-screen version is the one that lands, and the spoken version is what keeps the sound-on viewers from hearing a slideshow.
- Do I need different hooks for Reels and TikTok?
- The idea usually carries. The register does not. Reels tolerates a slightly more produced opening, while the same line delivered in an announcer voice gets identified as advertising much faster on TikTok.
- Does the cover frame matter if the hook is good?
- For the first pass through the feed, barely. For the months afterwards it matters a lot, because the Reel sits in your grid as a thumbnail and gets tapped or skipped on that frame alone.
- Can I reuse an opening that worked?
- Yes, and you should, until it stops. Reuse the shape rather than the exact sentence, since the same words repeated weekly stop reading as a thought and start reading as a catchphrase.
Write ten openings before you record one, then record them in a single sitting. With the first three finished verticals free and around ten a month after that at $19.99, the recording session becomes the expensive part, which is the right way round.