Social Hook

Given a draft or a topic, produce eight hook options across proven patterns, score each on scroll-stopping power and audience fit, and recommend the top two.

Context

Before writing anything, read social-context.md (also check .agents/social-context.md). You need:

• Brand voice: formal or casual, "I" or "we", banned words, humor tolerance
• Audience: who they are, what they already believe, what they scroll past daily
• The Never list, if present — a hook that breaks a red line is disqualified no matter how well it stops the scroll
• ## Platforms, if present, for where this post will run

If the file is missing, offer to run the social-context skill first — but do not block on it. Ask two or three quick questions inline (Who is the audience? Which platform? Tone in one word: playful, authoritative, or plain?) and proceed with the answers.

Workflow

1. Extract the payload. Read the draft or topic and isolate the single most surprising, specific, or emotionally charged element — a number, a reversal, a confession, a result. The hook sells that element, never the topic in general. "We changed our pricing" is a topic; "we doubled our price and churn went down" is a payload.
2. Confirm the platform. If the user has not said, ask once. Hook budgets differ (see Quality bar), and a hook shaped for X reads clipped and abrupt on LinkedIn. If the post targets multiple platforms, score against the primary one and note any hook that would need trimming elsewhere.
3. Decide what the hook must do for this post. A launch announcement needs reach (favor bold claim, number); a discussion post needs replies (favor question, contrarian); a story post needs read-through (favor cold-open, curiosity gap). Name the job in one line before drafting — it becomes a tiebreaker when scores are close.
4. Write exactly eight hooks, one per pattern, no two opening with the same word:

• Curiosity gap — open a loop only the body can close ("The pricing email we almost didn't send").
• Bold claim — a defensible absolute ("Most pricing pages are designed to be ignored").
• Specific number/result — lead with the metric ("We raised prices 2x. Churn dropped 14%.").
• Contrarian take — argue against the audience's default belief, then earn it in the body.
• Story cold-open — drop into the scene mid-action, zero preamble ("The email had been live six minutes when the first cancellation arrived").
• Direct question — one the reader answers "yes" or "ouch" to, never a rhetorical shrug.
• "How I/we" framing — process promise with a concrete outcome ("How we repriced without a single angry email").
• Listicle promise — numbered and scoped ("3 pricing mistakes we made so you don't have to").

1. Apply hook hygiene to every option:

• No throat-clearing: "I've been thinking a lot about...", "So, quick story", "Excited to share" all die on sight.
• Front-load a concrete noun or number into the first five words — that is all a skimming eye reads.
• Cut every adjective not doing work; "huge" and "amazing" are filler, "14%" is a hook.
• Never promise what the body cannot cash — an overpromising hook gets the post ratioed, not read.
• Write for the fold: the hook must work even if it is the only line anyone sees.
• Stay inside the red lines: if a hook trips the Never list or a voice rule, rewrite it within the same pattern — never ship a disqualified hook, and never drop below eight to avoid one.

1. Score scroll-stopping power 1–10. Judge each hook as it would appear in a feed between two other posts: does it force a second read? Anchor the scale:

• 9–10 — physically hard to scroll past; specific, tense, or pattern-breaking.
• 6–8 — solid; a reader interested in the topic stops, others may not.
• 3–5 — competent but familiar; blends into the feed.
• 1–2 — announces a topic instead of selling a payload.

1. Score audience fit 1–10 against the voice and audience from social-context. Anchor the scale:

• 9–10 — indistinguishable from the brand's voice and squarely aimed at this reader.
• 6–8 — on-topic and on-audience, but the voice is generic; anyone could have written it.
• 3–5 — off-voice or aimed at the wrong reader; needs a rewrite to fit.
• 1–2 — breaks a voice rule, or talks down to / over the audience.

A 10/10 stopper that sounds nothing like the brand is a liability — score honestly and let the numbers expose the tradeoff.

1. Write a one-line why for each. Name the mechanism ("opens a loop", "the number does the arguing", "picks a fight with the default advice"), not a compliment. If a hook scores low, the why says what is missing, so the user learns the pattern.
2. Recommend the top two. Prefer hooks strong on both axes over a single-axis spike. If both winners use the same pattern, swap one for the best hook of a different pattern and say why — the user deserves two genuinely different bets.
3. Offer one revision round. If the user picks a hook and asks for variations, produce three tighter takes on that single pattern rather than re-running all eight — depth beats breadth once a direction is chosen.

Quality bar

| Platform | Hook budget | Notes | | --------- | -------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | LinkedIn | ~200 chars before "...see more" | First line must survive the fold alone; hard line break after it. | | X | ≤240 chars for the hook tweet | Leave room to breathe; no hashtags or links in the hook itself. | | Instagram | ~125 chars visible before "more" | First caption line is the headline; emoji only if on-voice. |

• Every hook must be true. If the draft cannot support the claim, weaken the hook, never the truth.
• No two hooks may share an opening word — eight options that all start with "How" are one option.
• Numbers beat adjectives: a real "14%" outperforms "significantly" every time.
• Questions need stakes. "Ever thought about pricing?" is a scroll-past, not a hook.
• Second person beats third: "your churn" outpulls "companies' churn".
• All eight hooks must pass the voice rules and the Never list from social-context — a banned word disqualifies the hook regardless of its score.
• If the payload is weak (no number, no tension, no story), say so before scoring — a great hook on an empty post just raises the bounce rate.

Deliverable

Return, in order:

1. One line naming the payload and the hook's job (from steps 1 and 3).
2. A single markdown table, one row per hook, with columns: #, Pattern, Hook, Stop (1–10), Fit (1–10), Why.
3. A Recommended section naming the top two, with one sentence each on when to choose which.

Nothing else — end there.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: inklate
• Source: inklate/social-skills
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://inklate.com

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.