Video Hooks: First 30 Seconds Guide & Transcript

[00:00] The first 30 seconds are the most important 30 seconds of the video. You know why? If you lose them here, you have no chance of watching the rest of the video. Storytelling is... I read a book on this.

[00:13] Story. De. Lane. See what I just did there? Did you tell the answer? You want to know the answer? I'll take even longer to write it. Storytelling is story delaying because we want to create the tension about what happened.

[00:26] We want to know what the outcome is, so we're going to just delay it. One episode, another episode, it's like, oh my God, I need to know right now. So what you need to know is just one thing when you're creating videos, especially mid to long form videos, right, is they're gone in 30 seconds.

[00:42] We look at our retention graph and the first 30 seconds, it's a massive drop off. So everybody who watched the video, if you lost 60, 70% of your audience, now you only have 30%, that's why you're not getting the views. So you have to make sure you front load it with things that keep them involved.

[00:57] Think of this as a mini teaser trailer for the rest of the content. The first 30 seconds are the most important 30 seconds of the video. You know why? If you lose them here, you have no chance of watching the rest of the video.

[01:09] Minute one if you're watching minute 30. They can only watch minute three if they're watching minute one. You see how this goes? So spend as much time and energy as possible writing, crafting, creating, building props for the first 30 seconds to hook the person in.

[01:23] And then the rest of the video you piece in a lot of all the answers What happens is if you you start sitting with a big question you hook people They tend to be rhetorical questions that begin with the word why. And you're trying to create some kind of pattern interruption. I'll give

[01:37] you some examples. One of the most viewed TED Talks is by a guy named Simon Sinek. Whenever you see a hot piece of content, consume it, inhale it, break it down, reverse engineer what works, okay? He goes something like this. He walks up to a whiteboard, right? A blank

[01:52] piece of paper because have you ever wondered why some companies outperform others is it because they have more research more talent or something else why is it that people prefer apple versus

[02:04] this why is it the white brothers were able to prevail so once you have those big questions this is there's a technique that you can do it works but you can't use it that often because people will come to expect it i'll watch brendan kane's videos on instagram and he does this thing

[02:19] where he goes, successful people never ask for help. I got to watch the video now. And he would go in, and for the first 15 seconds, he was like, here's what successful people do. They do all the work themselves. They never ask for help. And when they hit a roadblock, they just grind it out and figure out the answers.

[02:34] Of course this is not true. You see what he just did there? He did a pattern interrupt by telling you something you didn't think was true. He got you to watch it, and then he bridged it to something that he wants to talk about.

[02:46] And if he does it, if he does it too often, then you'll say, oh my God, everything is the opposite. I don believe anymore It just a clickbait So you got to use that pretty sparingly But it got you to watch One of his weird videos which I didn understand but we did have a conversation about

[03:02] was this video where he locked out camera, looking at a street, vanishing point right in the center, slightly over cassette, but not inclement weather. He walks into frame, into the center of frame. He looks at camera, and he opens up a red umbrella.

[03:16] And he stands there. And then cash money starts raining on top of him. Until it stops. He lowers the umbrella, and that's the whole video. I think he has, like, 700,000 views.

[03:28] You know what he was able to do in that video? Does anybody know why that video got 700,000 views? Suspense. You would have gotten extra points if you said the words that I wanted you to use. Story delaying.

[03:40] He just drew it out like, you're like, what? And each time, he would change the thing. Why is somebody walking in a frame with an umbrella? Why is the umbrella open? What's going to happen? We expect rain to come down or water or something, but instead cash comes down.

[03:55] It's just weird. So weird also works as long as you are able to draw them to the very end. So we're going to create the pattern interruptions, the hook, the big rhetorical questions. And then if you want to, you can have a small or a soft call to action.

[04:09] A soft call to action isn't like trying to leave a hard page, trying to sell anything. It's more like, hey, before we go on, if you like and comment on the channel, appreciate it. It helps with the algorithm. You see a lot of people doing that and those videos tend to do well because we forget or we lost them and they forgot to do it and it done So you can do a soft call to action okay Other kinds of soft call to action is like a little bit sneaky stealth marketing where

[04:32] you wear a certain hat or something like that and you're not telling anybody to do anything but it's pretty apparent what's happening. Then what you want to do is you want to get right into the topic, the what and the how. So on this video, we're going to talk about like why some companies are successful and

[04:44] a breakdown in three key studies. I'm going to tell you how it happens. and what you can do to apply this same thinking in your company, within your organization. And now you have to deliver the goods. This is where the value is delivered. And then you can finish it off with your call to action and keys.

[04:58] Okay? You don't need to have a call to action. I prefer that you don't. Like, buy my product, watch this course, enroll in this boot camp. It kind of negates the goodwill that you just created. How many of you guys have watched something, thought it was super valuable,

[05:12] and then realized you're being sold to in that video, and your opinion and your trust changes? So be careful about the call to action. But if you have zero call to action, you probably make no money. So every once in a while, you can have a call to action.

[05:25] So the call to action that I ask in the end is, if you like this, make sure you subscribe. Or make sure you turn the bell on for notifications so you won't miss another video. Or, hey, if you like this, listen to the podcast because we have a deeper conversation with Brendan King that's not edited.

[05:41] You might enjoy that. those are appropriate call to actions that won't alienate you from the audience because it's not related to the C-Country. I'm not trying to sell you anything.