1. The Contrarian Flip
Instead of telling people what they should do, tell them what they absolutely should not do :)
Instead of writing "Why companies need to give juniors a chance," a much better way to spark interest is to write: "Why hiring juniors is dangerous and companies must stop doing it”.
When I posted that exact hook two years ago, it pulled 2,700 likes and 400K impressions.
2. Challenge the Status Quo
Got a belief that goes against conventional wisdom in your space? Use it.
Virality comes from emotionally charged content that appeals to a broad audience.
In plain English: you need an opinion that people can strongly agree with or strongly disagree with, but absolutely cannot ignore.
Oh, and it has to be about a topic everyone already knows, because your hot take on funnel segmentation might be riveting in your office, but it's not going to move the needle online.
Examples:
Unpopular opinion: ____ (your contrarian take).
I read X books on Y and decided to blatantly ignore all of them. Here's why:
This is why the "experts" in X have been misleading you:
90% of people trying to do X are getting it wrong. Here's how to be in the 10% that doesn't fall for it:
3. Lists
The biggest mistake creators make is trying to cram more than one point into a single piece of content.
When you try to dump knowledge on multiple topics at once, your audience misses the point entirely.
The fix? List posts and list videos.
5 tips for writing better content.
20 things I'd tell my 20-year-old self.
The 10 best books I read this year.
Now here's the thing: that's solid content if it's well-written, but it's not a viral hook.
To make it viral, you need to layer in two more ingredients:
Credibility.
A contrarian angle.
What does that look like in practice?
It means that to convince your audience to consume your list, you need to show them how much work you put in behind the scenes to back up the points you're about to make, and the points themselves need to deliver something they haven't heard before.
Examples:
I published over 300 posts on LinkedIn this year. Here are the 7 patterns that showed up in every post that blew up.
I'm celebrating 30 years of marriage today. Here are 5 pieces of relationship advice I got in my twenties that turned out to be complete garbage.
4. DTA (Differentiation Through Action)
90% of content online is generic advice you've already read a thousand times.
Am I saying my content includes advice that's never been shared before? Not even close.
But the one thing I do that makes it feel more authentic is connect every piece of advice to a personal story that only I can tell.
And the more unusual the thing you did, the higher the chance your post explodes.
Examples that worked for me:
“Tens of thousands of dollars in luxury, for free: I spent an entire day living like a millionaire using nothing but social skills”.
“TL;DR: Our podcast made it to Times Square!”
“TL;DR: How I got the Cartier team in Paris to close the store just for me and let me try on rings worth millions”.
“We changed three slides in a pitch deck. They raised two million dollars because of it”.
These are the hooks that blow up the hardest, and as you can probably tell, they're also the hardest to come by.
Mainly because they require that minor detail of actually going out into the world and doing things worth talking about :)
But I'm here to tell you that the ROI on these, at least when it comes to reach and visibility online, blows every other type of content out of the water.
Go crush it 💜