Social and short-form

Short-form is copywriting with no room to hide. A post has seconds to land, so every word counts double and the first line is almost everything. The opening line of a post is its headline, its hook, and often the only part that gets read in the feed before someone scrolls on. Make it earn the second line or lose the reader entirely.

A useful checklist for a short hook: is it urgent, unique, useful, and ultra-specific. A line that is all four stops the scroll. A line that is none of them is wallpaper. You do not need all four every time, but a hook with none of them is dead on arrival.

Keep one idea and one ask, exactly as in email. A post trying to make three points makes none. And resist the pull of short-form to go staccato, the choppy fragment cadence the medium seems to reward. It is still the thing to avoid. A single flowing thought that packs a lot in beats a string of clipped stubs, even here, even where everyone else is chopping. Concise is the goal, not chopped.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What's a first line that stopped YOUR scroll recently, and why did it work? How would you write a hook that does that for your own stuff without going staccato?

INTERVIEW EWOUD: When you post about a venture, what's the one idea and the one thing you want a reader to do? How often do you accidentally try to do too much in one post?