The first eight words decide the whole video
In television you learn quickly that nobody owes you their attention. A viewer with a remote control is a brutally honest focus group, and they make the call in about a second.
Social video is the same, except the remote is a thumb and the second is shorter.
What an opener has to do
Not “grab attention”. That advice is useless because it does not tell you what to type. An opener has one job: tell the right person that this is for them, and give them a reason to stay for the next line.
That is it. Everything else — the story, the tip, the offer — happens after.
The method
Write the video first. All of it. Then go back and write the opener, because until the video exists you do not know what you are opening.
Then write eight of them. Not one, eight. The first three will be the ones everybody writes:
- “In this video I’m going to show you…”
- “So I’ve been thinking a lot about…”
- “Hi, I’m Chris and I help people with…”
Throw those away. They are throat-clearing. The useful ones start at about number five, when you have run out of obvious things to say and have to actually think.
What tends to work
Name the person. “If you have ever deleted a video before posting it” beats “if you struggle with confidence”.
Start in the middle. “So this was the third take and it was still wrong” puts the viewer inside something already happening.
Say the unpopular thing. “You do not need better lighting” earns a second of attention from everyone who was about to go and buy a light.
The test
Read the first eight words out loud with the rest of the script covered up. If you cannot tell who the video is for, it is not an opener yet — it is a warm-up, and warm-ups belong before you press record.