GTM Sauce

A healthy eating brand · B2C · early Noise customer

Put eggs in the first image of healthy-eating slideshows

Higher-view slideshows consistently had eggs in the hook image; no numbers

Workedorganic-short-video

What they did

Across many accounts posting healthy-eating slideshows for one brand, the higher-view ones always had eggs (hard-boiled or scrambled) in the first hook image, in an AI-generated Pinterest style. Eggs are instantly recognizable, healthy, cheap and achievable, so viewers relate and swipe to the next slide, a strong signal to TikTok.

What happened

Egg hook images were 'a rocket ship' for views compared with the rest.
Stage
early

In their words

Nic Weber - Meet The Guy Who Solved TikTok

Play from 5:16
5:14

Joseph ChoiOh, just tell me that right now.

5:16

Nic WeberIn the early days, when we're doing slideshows for a brand that we were working with, we noticed that the ones that were doing higher views always had some form of eggs on them. And I can actually pull up an example here for you, too. Yeah. So this is just from one account and there were many of them doing this.

5:30

Nic WeberAnd you'll notice on all of these that aesthetically they're sort of similar, but they all have some version of egg in them. And so we started calling it the eggs theory, and it really helped us solidify what hooks meant because we thought that the eggs here were making it go viral because it was about clean eating, it was about healthy eating, and eggs are one, instantly visually understandable.

5:51

Nic WeberNot only are they a whole food and healthy, but they're also super affordable, right? Everybody knows what an egg is. The last election was based on the prices of egg cost, which is crazy that this little piece of food makes that much of a difference.

6:04

Nic WeberYou see over and over and over again that putting hard-boiled eggs, putting scrambled eggs in these first hook images just absolutely was a rocket ship in terms of viewership.

6:13

Joseph ChoiI don't really get it, but like if it works, it works. TikTok is very mysterious sometimes.

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Tags: tiktok, hooks, hook-image, slideshows, ai-images