The Hook Test
How I used Instagram Trial Reels to rethink my hooks, reach new audiences and take one client story from around 10K views to almost 3 million
A case study by Angela Eruba, Founder of Fab XtensionsThe first time I posted this appointment, the Reel did around 10,000 views. Nothing terrible, and under normal circumstances I probably would have left it there and moved on to the next piece of content.
But I looked at it again the following day and realised I'd barely used the most interesting part of the story.
The footage was already good. I liked the edit. I liked the music. What I changed was the opening line.
That second version is now approaching 3 million views, and the difference between those two posts completely changed the way I think about hooks, Trial Reels and how quickly we can write off good content when the first version doesn't travel.
It also changed much more than the number sitting underneath one Reel.
My account grew from around 4,100 followers to 8,000. Older posts started receiving attention again. People became interested in my training. Creators and brands whose work I had followed and admired started appearing in my comments because, for the first time, they were discovering me too.
Then Viola Davis reposted the Reel.
That was probably the moment when the scale of what was happening really registered with me. I hadn’t pitched her. I hadn’t sent the video to anybody hoping they would share it. The content had simply travelled far enough to reach someone with an audience of millions.
And that opened up a much bigger question for me.
What else can happen when the right piece of content introduces your work to enough new people?
Maybe somebody becomes a client. Maybe they want to learn from you. Maybe a brand discovers you. Maybe somebody with an opportunity remembers your name months later. Maybe absolutely nothing happens immediately and the value appears somewhere you couldn’t have predicted.
I don’t know what else this particular Reel will lead to yet.
That is partly why I wanted to document the experiment while it was still happening.
This isn’t a promise that I can make your next Reel go viral. I can’t, and neither can anybody else.
It’s a breakdown of what I tested, what happened, what I learned from it and the process I now use before deciding that a piece of content simply “didn’t work.”
PART ONE
The test
A little girl came into my studio for her first braids.
She had a beautiful amount of long hair and was completely invested in the appointment. She watched what I was doing, sat incredibly well and clearly could not wait to see the finished result.
I filmed the appointment and posted the Reel with:
“Look at all that hair.”
It did around 10K views, which was perfectly fine. There was nothing about that performance that would have made me think I had overlooked a piece of content capable of reaching millions of people.
I probably would have moved on.
Except her mum had told me something at the beginning of the appointment that I hadn’t really used.
She had been asking for braids for two years.
Once I thought about that, I realised I had led with the least interesting part of the whole experience.
Yes, she had a lot of hair.
But the reason this appointment meant something was that this little girl had wanted braids for two years and Mum had finally said yes.
So I went back to the Reel and changed the opening to:
“She’d been asking for braids for TWO YEARS… Mum finally said yes.”
That was the version I tested as a Trial Reel.
And it kept moving.
First six figures. Then hundreds of thousands. Then a million. Every time I thought it had probably reached the end of its run, it seemed to find another audience.
Now it is approaching 3 million views.
PART TWO
The method: Multi-Hook Strategy
I learnt the general principle of creating multiple hooks for one piece of content through training I invested in from another creator.
I want to be clear about that because I’m not interested in taking somebody else’s framework and pretending I invented it.
What became mine was what happened when I took that idea, applied it to real appointments inside Fab Xtensions, combined it with Trial Reels and started paying much closer attention to how people responded.
That is what eventually became The Hook Test.
1. Go back and find the story you didn’t tell
Start with a piece of content you genuinely thought deserved better.
Not bad footage you’re desperately trying to rescue.
Something where the work was strong, the visual was good or the moment itself had something in it, but the response was ordinary.
Then stop looking only at what is physically visible in the video.
Think about everything that happened around it.
Why did that person book?
What had they been asking for?
Was it their first time?
Were they nervous?
Had they waited for something?
Was there something funny, emotional or unexpected during the appointment?
Did they say something that completely changed how you understood the moment?
In my case, the strongest part of the story had been handed to me before I even started braiding.
Two years.
I had that information the entire time and still led with the amount of hair on her head.
That’s why I now pay much more attention to the context around the footage.
Sometimes the Reel you think is about a hairstyle is actually about anticipation.
Sometimes the makeover is about confidence.
Sometimes the product demo is really about frustration.
Sometimes the client story is about a first.
The visual gets somebody’s attention, but the context can give them a reason to care.
2. Find several real ways into the same piece of content
This is where the Multi-Hook Strategy became useful for me.
The point isn’t to take one sentence and rewrite it fifteen slightly different ways.
You’re looking for different reasons somebody might care about the same content.
That one little girl’s appointment could have become content about the two-year wait, her first braids, how focused she was during the appointment, the Mummy & Me story, working with her natural hair texture or even a back-to-school story later in the year. The source draft already identifies those as distinct story angles rather than simple wording variations.
None of those stories needs to be manufactured.
They were all already there.
That changed the way I think about content creation because I stopped automatically assuming that:
one appointment = one Reel = one hook.
An appointment can give you several genuinely different pieces of content if you pay attention to what actually happened.
A simple way to look for your angles
If it was somebody’s first time, there may be a first-time story.
If they’ve wanted something for months or years, there may be a desire or anticipation story.
If something unexpected happened, there may be a curiosity story.
If the visual difference is dramatic, there may be a transformation story.
If your clients repeatedly worry about the same thing, there may be a problem or objection story.
If there was a lovely interaction between you and the client, that may be the human story.
And sometimes the detail you would usually cut out is the thing that makes the content feel real.
3. Be specific about what the content actually is
One small thing I noticed with this Reel was the importance of the word braids.
I could have said hairstyle.
I could have called it a transformation.
I could have made the wording vague enough to apply to almost anything.
But she hadn’t been asking her mum for a “hairstyle” for two years.
She wanted braids.
That specificity mattered to the story, and it also immediately told somebody who had never seen me before what they were looking at.
I think we sometimes make our hooks weaker because we’re trying to make them sound more universal.
You don’t always need broader language.
Sometimes the specific thing is exactly what gives the story its meaning.
And I also think there is an important difference between describing something that is already obvious on screen and introducing information that makes somebody want to stay.
“Look at all that hair” described what the viewer could already see.
“She’d been asking for braids for two years” introduced something they couldn’t see.
Now there was context.
And there was an unanswered question:
What did she look like when she finally got them?
A hook doesn’t need to sound clever.
It needs to make the next few seconds feel worth watching.
4. If you’re testing something, don’t change absolutely everything
This is one of the reasons I find the original experiment so useful.
I didn’t remake the whole Reel. I liked the footage, edit and length, and I kept BIRDS OF A FEATHER because I liked the way it felt with the footage. Even the word “baby” in the song worked naturally with this little girl finally getting the braids she had been asking for.
The biggest deliberate change was the opening story.
That doesn’t mean I can prove the hook alone caused almost 3 million views.
But imagine if I had changed the first line, switched the music, shortened the video, completely re-edited it, changed the first clip and rewritten everything else at the same time.
I might still have got a different result.
I just wouldn’t have learnt very much from it.
So when I’m deliberately testing now, I try not to change everything at once.
I want the result to tell me something useful.
PART THREE
Why Trial Reels changed the way I test content
Before this experiment, I think I was doing what a lot of business owners naturally do.
You post something to your audience.
You see how they respond.
Then you use that reaction to decide whether the content was good.
Trial Reels made me question that.
Because people who have followed you for a long time are not experiencing your content the same way somebody discovering you for the first time is.
Your audience can love your work and still be familiar with it
Some of my Trial Reels now perform better than posts I put directly in front of my existing followers.
At first, that seems strange.
Then I started thinking about how familiarity works.
Someone who has followed Fab Xtensions for several years has probably seen a lot of my braiding.
They can see another beautiful set of braids, genuinely admire it and keep scrolling because they already know I can braid.
They don’t need to tap my profile to find out who I am.
They don’t need to follow me because they already do.
They may not feel compelled to comment because nothing about seeing good work from me is particularly surprising anymore.
That doesn’t mean they don’t value it.
It means the relationship is different.
Someone discovering Fab Xtensions through a Trial Reel is seeing everything with fresh eyes. They haven’t already watched dozens of my transformations, they don’t know what my usual standard looks like and they have no reason to assume the next hairstyle will be worth stopping for.
I have to earn that attention from the beginning.
That is why I’m careful about calling this audience fatigue.
What I can observe is that content sometimes behaves very differently when it is placed in front of people who have no existing relationship with me.
And that has become one of the biggest reasons I love Trial Reels.
Sometimes your content needs a new audience before it needs replacing.
What I’m really trying to learn from a cold audience
I’m not interested in reducing Instagram to:
Get enough likes and the algorithm will reward you.
There are far too many variables involved for me to pretend content distribution is that simple.
What interests me more is the behaviour.
If somebody has never heard of me and they stop scrolling, watch, comment, share the Reel, visit my profile or decide to follow me, that tells me the content gave a stranger a reason to do something.
That is useful information.
So the question I’m asking when I test content is:
Can this earn a response from somebody who owes me absolutely nothing?
They aren’t my client.
They aren’t my friend.
They don’t know my work.
They haven’t been following my journey.
I’m meeting them for the first time.
If the story can make that person care, I want to know.
The second test mattered too
One viral Reel can make you feel like you’ve suddenly discovered the secret to Instagram.
I didn’t want to do that.
So I kept testing.
Another Trial Reel later passed 500K views.
That didn’t suddenly prove that every hook I write works.
It did make me more interested in continuing the experiment because now I had another piece of evidence that this way of thinking about hooks and cold audiences was worth exploring.
I also noticed something else.
I eventually shared the 500K Reel out more broadly to my audience, while the Reel that went on to approach 3 million stayed in Trial.
From what I could see, the 500K Reel didn’t continue building momentum in quite the same way afterwards.
I’m deliberately not turning that into advice like:
Never share a Trial Reel to your followers.
I cannot prove that sharing it changed the distribution.
There could have been ten other reasons its momentum slowed.
What the experience changed for me was my behaviour.
I stopped feeling as though I needed to interfere with a Trial Reel just because it was performing well.
If something is still finding new people, I’m much more comfortable letting it continue and watching what happens.
PART FOUR
The comments told me more than the view count
The numbers were exciting, obviously.
But when I started properly reading the comments, I realised the audience was giving me another kind of information.
They weren’t mainly talking about whether the braids were neat.
They kept talking about the story.
How long she had waited.
How focused she was.
How obvious it was that she really wanted them.
People started sharing their own childhood memories of wanting braids.
That fascinated me because the audience was effectively telling me what they thought the Reel was about.
And it wasn’t simply:
little girl gets braids.
They had connected with this tiny journey of a child wanting something for two years and finally getting it.
That’s when I started treating comments almost like free audience research.
Now when something performs, I don’t only look at how many comments there are.
I look for repetition.
What are several people independently noticing?
What part of the story are they telling back to me?
Which words keep appearing?
What is making somebody tell me a story about themselves?
What questions are coming up again and again?
That information can show you which part of the content actually landed.
And sometimes that is not the part you expected.
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