Social post craft

The hook decides everything

Most posts are lost in the first line, before any of the substance is reached. The opening has one job: make continuing feel more attractive than scrolling.

Openings that work:

• A specific claim with a number — concrete beats clever.
• A stated tension — two things the reader believes that cannot both be true.
• A named mistake — especially one the reader is probably making.
• An outcome, before the method — the result first, the how afterward.

Openings that do not: a question the reader can answer "no" to, a definition, throat-clearing about why the topic matters, and anything beginning "In today's world."

Write the hook last, after you know what the post actually says. Written first, it commits you to a post you have not thought through.

Structure

One idea. A post carrying two ideas gets remembered for neither.

Then: hook, the turn (why the obvious view is incomplete), the substance (specific, ideally first-hand), and the landing — a conclusion, not a request for engagement.

Cut the first two lines of your draft. They are almost always warm-up.

Formatting is not cosmetic

Line breaks control pace and determine what is visible before the "see more" fold. On every major platform, the visible portion is one to three lines — everything about whether the post is read is decided there.

Short paragraphs. One thought per line for emphasis. No walls. Emphasis carried by structure, since most platforms strip formatting.

Check before publishing

• Is the first line strong enough alone, with no context?
• Does it survive the fold — is the visible part a complete enough thought to earn expansion?
• One idea, or two?
• Is anything in it specific to you? A post anyone in your field could have written performs like it.
• Would you send this to one person you respect? If not, do not send it to everyone.

A draft that fails these gets rewritten, not published with a caveat.

Sources

references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.

Tooling

Scheduling and publishing: Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, Sprout Social, Typefully, and similar. Native composers usually get better reach handling and newer formats first, so schedule what benefits from timing and post natively what benefits from features.

Whatever you use, keep the draft somewhere the copy can be reviewed before it enters the scheduler. Editing inside a publishing queue is how a typo goes out at 6am.

Never

• Publish a post whose first line only works after the reader expands it.
• Reuse one format across platforms unchanged. Line breaks and truncation differ, and the post breaks in ways the composer does not show you.
• Post a link without deciding whether the platform suppresses them.