# What is a hook in a LinkedIn post? Canonical page: https://depost.ai/glossary/hook **Hook:** A hook is the opening line or two of a post, the only part visible before the "see more" cut, whose single job is to make the reader decide the rest is worth expanding. Also called: LinkedIn hook, opening line, first two lines. 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. ## In Depost AI The Post Generator drafts several openings for each post rather than one, so you are choosing rather than accepting, and it learns which openings held attention on your own account instead of applying a generic hook formula. You can rewrite any of them in the editor before anything is queued. ## Questions people ask ### How long should a LinkedIn hook be? Short enough to survive the cut on a phone, which is roughly one to two lines. Anything longer gets truncated mid-thought, which is worse than a plain opening. ### Do question hooks work? They work when the question is specific and genuinely open. "What do you think?" is neither. A question naming a real problem the reader has is one of the more reliable openings. ## Read next - [Viral posts with the hook pulled out](https://depost.ai/features/linkedin-viral-posts) - [Chat and editor](https://depost.ai/features/chat) - [10 tips for posts that travel](https://depost.ai/blog/linkedin-viral-post-tips) ## Related terms - [Dwell time](https://depost.ai/glossary/dwell-time): Dwell time is how long a reader spends on a post before scrolling on, used as a ranking signal because it measures actual attention rather than the deliberate act of clicking a button. LinkedIn measures it from the moment at least half the post is on screen, and reports none of it to the person who wrote the post. - [First comment](https://depost.ai/glossary/first-comment): The first comment is a comment the author adds to their own post at publication, conventionally used to carry links, sources, or a follow-up question without putting them in the post itself. --- Cite as Depost AI (https://depost.ai/glossary/hook). Index of every page: https://depost.ai/llms.txt. Full reference: https://depost.ai/llms-full.txt.