Guide
A hook that sounds written dies on TikTok, however good it is
TikTok's native register is a person talking, mid-thought, with no title card and no sting under it. An opening written in advertising language announces itself as an advert before the first word finishes. Here are twenty openings that sound spoken, and the rules underneath them.
- Written openings below, none of them polished
- 20
- The window an opening has to survive
- 3 sec
- Title cards, logos or stings that help you here
- 0
The register is doing more work than the words
TikTok grew up on a camera held in one hand and somebody saying a thing they had not entirely finished thinking. The platform is full of professional work now, and the openings that still travel borrow that register anyway.
So the first job of an opening is not to be interesting. It is to avoid being identified as advertising in the first half second, because that identification is instant, involuntary and effectively final.
The tells are short and learnable. A logo. A title card. A musical sting under the first line. An adjective nobody uses about their own life, like premium or innovative. A voice that lifts in pitch on the first syllable, which is the sound of a person performing rather than talking.
What replaces them is unglamorous. Start on a noun or a verb, look at the lens as though it is a person you know, and let the first sentence be the middle of a thought instead of the beginning of a presentation.
- No title card, no logo and no sting over the first line.
- Start mid-thought. So the part nobody warns you about beats Welcome back to my channel.
- Put a specific number or a specific name inside the first sentence.
- Look at the lens, not at your own face in the preview.
The same claim in two registers
Left is how it gets written in a document. Right is how a person would actually say it.
| How it gets written | How it gets said | |
|---|---|---|
| Software | Introducing the fastest way to edit | I stopped opening my editor in January |
| Supplement | Clinically formulated for daily energy | The third ingredient is the only one doing anything |
| Agency | We deliver results for our clients | We lost a client last week and it was our fault |
| Course | Transform your business in thirty days | Two of the six modules are the ones people finish |
Ten openings that sound like a person, not a script
Read each one out loud before you choose. If your jaw does anything strange on the way through, the line was written rather than spoken and the camera will show it.
Several of these start on a discourse word, the okay or the so or the right that a real conversation begins with. That is deliberate. It signals that you are continuing a thought rather than opening a segment, and continuing a thought is what stops a thumb.
None of them contain an adjective about the product. Where a claim appears it appears as a number, a loss, or a thing that happened on a specific day.
- Okay, this is the part nobody warns you about.
- I was wrong about this for about two years.
- So a customer emailed me this morning and I have not stopped thinking about it.
- Do not do what I did in the first six months.
- This took eleven minutes and I am going to show you all of it.
- Nobody in my industry will say this on camera, so.
- I charge double what I charged last year and I am busier.
- Right, the thing on the left costs sixty pounds and the thing on the right costs six.
- My mum asked me what I actually do, so this is the answer.
- Genuinely the worst money I have ever spent.
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 when you have something to sell
Selling on TikTok is not forbidden, it is just conditional. The condition is that the video sounds like the person behind the thing rather than the marketing around it, which is why every line below is first person and most of them concede something.
The strongest of these open on the objection instead of waiting for it. Naming the price, the flaw or the bad review in the first sentence removes the thing the viewer was about to use as a reason to leave.
Do not soften them on the way to camera. The instinct to add a qualifier is the instinct that turns a spoken line back into a written one.
- I am going to talk about the price, because everybody asks and nobody answers.
- We had this in a box for a year before we worked out what it was for.
- If you have ever cancelled something on a Sunday night, this is for you.
- The reviews are wrong about one thing and it is the thing I care about.
- This is the cheap version. I use the cheap version.
- Three of you asked, one of you was rude about it, so here we go.
- I read an hour of our own returns emails and here is what they say.
- You are supposed to leave it on for ten minutes. I leave it on for two.
- We stopped running ads in June and nothing happened. That is the whole story.
- I have said this to five people this week so I may as well film it once.
Why an advert-sounding opening dies here specifically
Every feed has some resistance to advertising, and TikTok's is unusually fast because the audience's reference point for a normal video is a person talking at a phone rather than a produced spot.
The comparison happens without anybody deciding to make it. A polished opening is not being judged against other adverts. It is being judged against the video immediately before it, which was somebody in a kitchen, and it loses that comparison in half a second.
There is a second cost that is easy to miss. An opening that reads as an advert does not only lose the viewers who dislike adverts. It changes what the remaining viewers are doing: they switch from listening to evaluating, and evaluating is a much worse state to be watching from than curiosity.
The honest counterweight is that native does not mean sloppy. The audio has to be clean, the face has to be lit, the captions have to be readable. Production quality below the floor reads as careless rather than authentic, and careless is its own kind of advert.
So the practical rule is to spend your production budget on sound and light, and spend nothing at all on the things that announce a budget.
Ten openings, one recording session
The reason people record one opening rather than ten is the edit. Ten openings means ten cuts, and the tenth cut never gets made, which is how a list like the one above ends up unused in a notes app.
Cutroom exists for that specific bottleneck. One spoken take of up to three minutes goes in, and it transcribes every word, trims the silence, drops b-roll onto exactly the words you point at, and burns 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 carry a Cutroom mark; Lite at $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits is roughly ten finished one-minute videos, cancelled in one click.
The limits stated plainly: somebody has to speak on camera, three minutes is the ceiling on the source, every export is a vertical MP4, and there is no subtitle file at the end of it.
It also cannot make you sound unrehearsed. That is a decision made in the two seconds before you press record, and it is the only part of this page that takes nerve rather than time.
Questions people ask
- Do I have to say the hook out loud, or can it be text on screen?
- Say it and show it. A text-only opening over silent footage reads as a graphic, and graphics are one of the tells that get a video filed as advertising before anybody has heard a word.
- Does trending audio work as a hook?
- It buys a moment of familiarity and it ages badly, which makes it a poor foundation for anything you want running for months. Treat it as a supplement to an opening that already stands on its own words.
- Is it bad to look scripted?
- Looking prepared is fine. Sounding read is not. The difference is usually eye movement and pitch, so learn the first sentence properly and improvise the rest of the sentence structure around it.
- Can a brand account get away with the same openings?
- Only with a named person delivering them. The lines above are first person and most of them concede something, and a logo cannot concede anything, which is why brand accounts that work on TikTok almost always have a face attached.
- How many openings should I write before recording?
- Ten, and expect to use three. Writing past the obvious ones is where the specific numbers and the real admissions start showing up, and those are the parts that cannot be copied off anybody else.
Write ten, record them in one sitting, and delete the ones that sounded written when you played them back. With three finished verticals free in your first seven days and around ten a month after that at $19.99, the recording is the part that costs you something.