This cover photo is ridiculous. Did it hook you?

Anyways…

When it comes to hooking your audience, you have less time than you think. The average person now gives a post around 3-4 seconds (that’s generous) of attention before deciding whether to stay, down from over 12 seconds just a few years ago. On Reels specifically, engagement usually holds for the first 2-3 seconds, then drops by more than half before you even hit the 15 second mark. That’s not a guideline anymore. Just reality.

Here’s the part that creators have a hard time with. It’s not that people don’t want to watch you. It’s that we’ve all been trained, by every app on our phone, to make split-second exit decisions before we’ve even consciously registered what we’re looking at. Nobody’s doing this on purpose. It’s just what happens when your brain gets asked to make a thousand tiny judgment calls a day. Creators using a real hook in the first three seconds see a measurable jump in watch time, often over 50%, which tells you the fix isn’t complicated. It’s just non-negotiable.

Most people know the basic advice by now. Start strong, don’t bury the lead, blah blah. What they don’t talk about is the specific mechanics of what actually stops a thumb mid-scroll, the stuff that goes beyond “having a good hook” and into exactly what a good hook is built out of.

The tips you haven’t heard before:

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Every creator flops sometimes. You could have 50 million views across your account and still post something tomorrow that lands with a thud, and the algorithm won’t care. If engagement signals are low, it ain’t going nowhere.

Check out my flops here LOL

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Here’s the part people don’t say enough. A flop is relative, and the number that counts as a flop changes depending on who you are. Someone averaging 600,000 views might call 100,000 a flop. Someone averaging 5,000 views might call 300 a flop. The exact math doesn’t matter, and honestly, obsessing over the percentage is its own trap. A flop is whatever feels like a flop to you, in the moment, compared to what you expected. No formula needed.

What a flop does to your head

The numbers aren’t really the problem. The problem is what your brain does with them.

A flop doesn’t feel like “this video underperformed.” It feels like “people don’t like me.” That’s the leap, and it happens so fast you don’t even notice you made it. One video does poorly and suddenly you’re spiraling about whether you’ve lost your touch, whether people are tired of you, whether the last few months of growth were a fluke that’s about to unravel.

That’s the brutal part. Not the low view count. The story you tell yourself about what the low view count means.

Here’s the reframe

A video not performing has almost nothing to do with whether people like you. Think about your own scrolling habits for a second. How many times have you watched half of something, thought “that’s funny” or “that’s relatable,” and then gotten distracted by a text, a kid yelling from another room, a notification, and just never finished it, never liked it, never came back?

That’s not rejection. That’s a Tuesday. Life is busy, attention spans are fractured, and the algorithm counts every one of those half-watched, good-intentions-but-got-distracted moments as a data point against you, even though nothing about the person’s opinion of you actually changed.

Most flops aren’t a verdict. They’re just bad timing meeting a busy day, multiplied across enough people that it shows up as a number you can see.

What to do when it happens

Let the flop exist. Don’t build a story around it. It’s a number, not a referendum on your worth as a creator or a person.

Check if it’s a pattern or just noise. One flop is nothing. Three flops in a row using the same format might be information. Learn to tell the difference before you panic over a single data point.

Post again, soon. The fastest way out of the spiral is another post, not a retreat. Waiting to “figure out what went wrong” often just gives the story more time to calcify into something bigger than it is.

Remember the account average, not the worst day. You are not your lowest performing video. You are not your best one either. You’re the average of everything you’ve made, and averages don’t move much over one good or “bad” post. You are a creator, with a personal brand. Be confident in who you are and what you create.

Flopping isn’t a sign you’re losing. It’s a sign you’re still in the game, still posting, still taking the swing that most people are too scared to keep taking. The creators who make it aren’t the ones who never flop. They’re the ones who flop and post again the next day anyway.

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Check out one of my previous articles: How to Deal With Mean Comments When You Go Viral

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To be clear, I’m only talking about creators. If you’re not a creator you can turn likes off, on, and off again and I won’t be judging. However, a lot of creators turn off their likes. I never have, and I don’t plan to, and I want to talk about why.

The official reason people give is protection. It’s framed as self-care, a way to stop obsessing over a number, a way to post without the pressure of public approval sitting there in real time. Instagram itself sold it this way when they rolled out the option, positioning it as a mental health feature meant to depressurize the platform and take the competition out of posting.

I don’t buy that as the real reason why most creators do it.

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What turning off likes looks like from the outside

Here’s the thing that gave it away for me. I’ve watched creator after creator turn off their likes, quietly, without announcement, and then the second something of theirs goes properly viral, the likes come back on. Not always immediately, but often enough that it’s a pattern, not a coincidence.

If the goal were genuinely protecting your mental health from the pressure of public numbers, you wouldn’t flip it back on the moment the numbers finally look good. You’d leave it off. The fact that so many people don’t tells you the real function of turning likes off was never protection. It was control over the narrative when the numbers aren’t flattering.

That’s not self-care. That’s insecurity with a wellness framing on top of it.

What the research says

When Instagram first tested hiding likes, the psychology researchers weighing in were mostly talking about a very specific group: teenagers and young adults, and the effect public like counts have on their self-esteem and body image through constant social comparison. Sophia Choukas-Bradley, a psychologist who studies teen social media use, has pointed out that public metrics let people test and track which version of themselves gets the most positive feedback, which can spiral into some genuinely harmful comparison habits for a vulnerable age group.

That’s a real concern, and it’s a legitimate reason for a 16 year old to want their likes private. It is a much harder case to make for a grown adult running a business account, publicly building a following, actively trying to be seen by more people. The entire premise of being a content creator is putting your work in front of an audience and being evaluated by them. Opting out of the most basic, visible version of that evaluation, while still asking that audience to watch, comment, share, and eventually pay you, is a strange kind of protection to reach for.

Marketing researchers who studied the shift found something else worth mentioning. Multiple studies tracking accounts that hid their likes found real drops in engagement, in some cases up to 15%, and brands openly said they were less likely to work with creators whose likes were hidden, since it made it harder to gauge how a post actually performed. So functionally, hiding your likes doesn’t just remove pressure. It removes information, for you and for anyone deciding whether your content is worth investing in.

The part that matters

I’m not saying likes are a perfect measure of anything. They’re not. Comments, shares, saves, and watch time tell you far more about whether something actually landed. But hiding the number doesn’t make a low-performing post perform better. It just makes it harder for anyone, including you, to be honest about what worked and what didn’t.

If a post doesn’t do well, I’d rather sit with that, publicly, than quietly hide the evidence and pretend the number was never the point. The number was always somewhat the point. Pretending otherwise, especially only when it’s convenient, is the actual insecurity people are trying to hide when they hide their likes.

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Nobody warns you about this part. You spend weeks, sometimes years, trying to get something to take off, and when it does, buried somewhere in the flood of comments is a stranger telling you that you’re annoying, or ugly, or shouldn’t be a parent. That’s the trade. Reach comes with exposure, and exposure comes with people who have opinions about you they were not invited to share.

Here’s what I’ve learned, sometimes the easy way, mostly the hard way.

Mean comments are not a reflection of you. They’re a reflection of the number of people who saw your content. Go viral enough times and you’ll notice a pattern. The negative comments never scale. Out of hundreds of thousands of comments, the mean ones are a tiny sliver, so small it’s almost funny if you count them. That ratio tells you everything you need to know. It’s not that people suddenly dislike you. It’s that more people saw you, and a small, consistent percentage of any large enough crowd will always say something ugly. That’s not about you. That’s just what a crowd is.

So when it happens, don’t spiral into thinking your content failed or that you did something wrong. You didn’t. You reached enough people that the math caught up with you.

What to do about it

I’ve landed on three ways to handle it, depending on the comment and depending on my mood that day.

Option one: ignore it.

If you’re strong enough to just scroll past a mean comment without responding, that’s probably your best move. Every response you post is visible, permanent, and searchable. It becomes part of your public record, a little snapshot of who you are to anyone who clicks into that comment section later. Silence costs you nothing. A reply, even a good one, is still something you have to manage. If you can let it go without it eating at you, let it go.

Option two: a short, kind response, with a brief defense if you need one.

Sometimes staying silent doesn’t sit right, especially if the comment is spreading something untrue about you or your content. In that case, respond simply and kindly. Say what you need to say, correct what needs correcting, and then stop. Don’t get pulled into a back-and-forth. The second you start replying to their reply, you’ve handed them exactly what they wanted, which is your attention and your energy. Say your peace once, and walk away from the conversation, even if they keep talking.

Option three: kill them with kindness.

This one takes more energy, but it’s the most rewarding when it works. Instead of defending yourself or ignoring them, try flipping the interaction entirely. Respond with warmth. Ask a genuine question. Treat them like a person having a bad day instead of an enemy who needs defeating. More often than you’d expect, this actually de-escalates things. I’ve had comment threads that started as an attack and ended with the other person apologizing, sometimes even becoming a follower. Most people leaving a nasty comment aren’t looking for a fight, they’re looking for somewhere to put whatever they’re feeling that day. Occasionally you become the person who gives them a small, unexpected moment of decency instead, and it shifts the whole exchange.

Why people do this in the first place

Going viral puts you in front of people who don’t know you, don’t follow you, and have no context for who you are beyond the fifteen seconds they just watched. Some of them are jealous. Some are having a genuinely bad day and you happened to be the nearest target. Some just enjoy the anonymity of saying something they’d never say to a real person standing in front of them. None of it is really about you. You’re just the punching bag on screen they’re currently looking at.

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The part that matters most

Don’t take it personally. Don’t let it ruin your day, your week, or your motivation to keep creating. The math is on your side here, always. Out of everyone who sees your content, the ones being cruel are a fraction so small it barely registers once you look at the numbers. Let the good comments, the shares, the people who felt seen by what you made, be the loudest thing in the room. The negativity is loud in the moment, but it’s outnumbered every time.

Keep posting anyway. NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU, OKAY??

XO

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Your next read: Finding your Voice as a Content Creator!

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First of all, I want you to know that I don’t always follow my own rules. I know exactly what should perform well, and I will still post something else entirely, just because it’s what I feel like saying that day. Because content creation is not about being perfect. Most people out there don’t want to see perfection. They want to see real. And one of the biggest problems with social media right now is that nobody has the attention span to watch a 30 second video if it’s not hooking them in the first second and keeping them throughout.

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Chase what’s real, but never forget you have about one second to earn someone’s attention before they scroll past you.

Coming up with Ideas

Most of the time, the idea starts with nothing.

Usually there’s no plan involved at all. Something happens, or something occurs to me, mid-conversation, mid-chore, mid-nowhere, and I just know it’s something others will relate to. When that happens I don’t sit on it. I whip my phone out and record it right then, while it’s still got whatever made it funny or true in the first place attached to it.

That immediacy matters more than people think. The second you wait, you start editing the moment in your head, smoothing it out, making it sound more like content and less like the actual thought. By the time you finally film it, you’ve usually lost the thing that made it worth filming.

But sometimes the idea needs more than a phone and a minute

Every now and then what I come up with is bigger than a quick grab-the-phone moment. It needs a setup, a specific location, more than one take, actual planning. Those ones I can’t just do in the moment, especially with two kids who treat “mom is filming something” as their cue to start chaos.

For those, I have to actually find a window. Nap time, a quiet stretch after they’re in bed, a moment when nobody’s currently crying. It’s less spontaneous, but the idea still came from the same place, it just needed more logistics behind it before it could become something. I keep those ideas as notes in my phone. The Notes app will be your new best friend.

What stays the same either way

Whether it’s a thirty-second grab or a planned setup, the thing I’m chasing is the same. Something real enough that it doesn’t feel like content, wrapped tight enough that it doesn’t lose anyone in the first second.

There’s a lot more underneath how I actually make that call in real time, how I know an idea is worth the extra planning versus just letting it go, and what the actual process looks like.

For now, just know the process is messier than it looks, and that’s kind of the point. If you record something, and you like it and you want to post it, go for it! Even if you know it doesn’t follow all the “rules”.

Subscribe for deeper dives into these “rules” I’ve been yapping about.

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You might be wondering: how do I find my voice? Like it’s buried somewhere and you need a shovel.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you. You already have it. You’ve had it your whole life, in every group chat, every rant to your partner about something that happened at Costco, every time you made a friend laugh without trying. Your voice is not the problem. …

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I started posting on Instagram three years ago with no plan, no strategy, and definitely no idea what I was doing. I was (and am) a stay-at-home mom with two kids under five, a phone camera, and the kind of exhaustion that makes everything hard. Oh and I’m a social media manager!

For my niche, I picked sarcastic mom life. It’s hard out here, we gotta laugh about it.

Today that account, @thebasicbritt, has close to 30,000 people who show up to watch me talk about motherhood. I've had a single response video hit 16 million views. I've had many original reels hit between 1-6 million.

I'm telling you this not to brag, but to make a point: none of that happened because I had a marketing degree, a ring light, or a plan. It happened because I paid attention to what worked, kept doing more of it, and got specific instead of generic.

That's the entire course, honestly. Getting specific.

Why most content doesn't work

Most people who fail at this don't fail because they're not funny or not interesting. They fail because they're vague. They post something that could have been written by anyone, about anything, for anyone. Nothing about it says "this is a person," so nothing about it makes you stop scrolling. Also, ENERGY.

The accounts that grow are the ones with a voice you'd recognize with the caption covered up. That's not a talent you're born with. It's a skill you build by paying close attention to your own instincts and refusing to sand them down into something safer.

What this actually is

Over the next several lessons, I'm going to walk you through exactly how I built this.

We'll cover:

- How to find a voice that's yours, not a copy of whoever's trending this month

- How the algorithm behaves, and how to stop guessing

- How to hook someone in the first two seconds before they scroll past you

- How to make content when your life does not have room for content

- How to read your own numbers so you know what's working

- How to turn an audience into actual income, without turning into a salesperson

And SO much more. I’ll never run out of things to teach.

One thing I want to be upfront about

I'm here to show you exactly how I built an audience out of the chaos of my life, so you can do the same with yours.

If that sounds like something you want, stick around. The next lesson starts with the thing nobody tells you about finding your voice: it's already there. You've just been editing it out.

Subscribe to join this course and become a successful content creator!