What is a hook in a LinkedIn post?

Everything below the cut is invisible until someone acts. That makes the hook structurally different from the rest of the writing: the body has to be worth reading, but the hook has to earn the click, and those are not the same skill.

The reliable mechanism is a gap the reader wants closed. A claim they want to argue with, a number that does not sound right, an admission that suggests a story. All of them create a small unresolved question, and expanding the post is how it gets resolved.

The cut falls earlier than most people write for. On a phone, roughly the first 140 characters are visible before "see more", and the phone is where most of your audience is. A hook that lands its point in the third line has landed it somewhere nobody sees, so the test worth applying is how the post reads truncated at two short lines.

The most common failure is throat-clearing. Opening with context, a greeting, or a scene-setting clause spends the two lines you get on words that could precede any post. If your first line would work on somebody else’s post, it is not a hook.

The second failure is over-promising. A hook that manufactures more tension than the body resolves does win the click, once, and then costs you the reader who feels baited. Specific beats dramatic: a concrete number, a named mistake, or a real outcome earns the expansion honestly and keeps earning it post after post.

Write it last. You cannot promise the reader something specific until you know what the post actually says, and hooks written first tend to over-promise what the body then fails to deliver.