These X best practices are part of our ongoing series on social media best practices. Also in this series: Facebook Best Practices, Instagram Best Practices, TikTok Best Practices, Snapchat Best Practices and LinkedIn Best Practices.
Platform Information
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is still the place people go when something is happening right now. Breaking news, live sports, product launches, customer complaints and industry conversations all surface on X first, which is why it remains a core channel for brands that want to be part of the conversation rather than just broadcast into it.
The platform’s scale is worth stating carefully, because X stopped publishing audited user numbers after it went private in 2022. The most reliable recent figure comes from the SpaceX S-1 filing in May 2026, which reported roughly 550 million monthly active users as of March 2026, up from 520 million in December 2025, and about 350 million posts per day. Third-party estimates range from about 557 million to 611 million. The takeaway: a large, active, news-driven audience, and a lot of competition for attention.
What has changed since the Twitter era is the shape of the platform. The feed is now algorithm-first, the character limit has effectively disappeared for paid subscribers, long-form Articles and native video sit alongside short posts, and a paid verification checkmark is table stakes for any brand that wants to be seen. The sections below cover what that means in practice.
How the X Algorithm Works
The single biggest shift on X is that the feed is no longer a follower game. In January 2026, X published the code behind its For You feed on GitHub (xai-org/x-algorithm), a full rewrite built on a Grok-based transformer model called Phoenix. A larger update followed in May 2026. Since late 2025, even the Following tab is ranked by the same system rather than shown in chronological order.
In plain terms, here is what the algorithm does every time someone opens the app:
- It pulls roughly 1,500 candidate posts, about half from accounts the person follows and half from accounts they do not.
- It filters out anything older than 48 hours, anything the person has already seen, and anything from muted or blocked accounts.
- It predicts, for each remaining post, how likely that specific person is to like, reply, repost, bookmark, dwell on, or report it. Negative signals (mute, block, report, “not interested”) count against a post.
- It ranks by the weighted sum of those predictions and serves the top results.
What this means for brands:
- Follower count is not reach. A post from a small account can land in the For You feed of thousands of non-followers if it earns strong early engagement. The reverse is also true.
- The first hour matters most. Early engagement velocity is what tells the system to widen distribution. Post when your team can reply to comments in real time.
- Replies are the heaviest signal. Posts that generate conversation outrank posts that only collect likes. Ask questions, take positions, and answer the replies you get.
- Posts have a 48-hour shelf life in the For You feed. Evergreen content needs to be re-posted, not just posted once.
- Replies and reposts from your account do not spread to strangers’ feeds on their own. They help you build relationships with the accounts you engage with, but original posts are what drive discovery.
- The model reads your content. Since the August 2026 update, ranking includes a learned representation of what a post is actually about, including its media. Clear, specific posts about one topic are easier for the system to match to interested readers than vague ones.
Platform Audience
X’s audience skews male and concentrates in the 18 to 34 range, with a strong tilt toward news, sports, tech, politics and B2B conversation. Because X no longer publishes audited demographics, the figures below come from DataReportal’s analysis of X’s own advertising audience data and from Pew Research Center’s US surveys. Treat them as directional.
Global ad audience by age, per DataReportal:
- 37.5% are 25 to 34
- 32% are 18 to 24
- 18% are 35 to 49
- 12% are 50+
Global ad audience by gender, per DataReportal (October 2025):
- 64% male
- 36% female
In the US, Pew Research finds that about 21% of adults use X, flat year over year. Men use it at a higher rate than women (25% versus 16%), and usage is highest among adults 18 to 29 and falls with age. Roughly six in ten X users globally say news is a primary reason they are on the platform, which is why timely, reactive content performs so well.
Verification and Profile Setup
Verification is no longer free, and for a brand it is no longer optional. The legacy checkmark program ended in 2023. Today every checkmark on X is paid, and verified accounts get a measurable ranking advantage in replies and search.
For brands, there are two realistic paths:
- X Premium (blue checkmark): $8/month on web or $11/month on iOS for the standard tier. Premium+ was raised to $40/month in March 2026. Both include the checkmark, 25,000-character long posts, Articles, post editing, Media Studio and ad revenue sharing. Basic ($3/month) unlocks long posts but not the checkmark.
- X Premium Business, formerly Verified Organizations (gold checkmark): the Basic tier launched at $200/month or $2,000/year and the Full Access tier at $1,000/month. Full Access adds affiliate badges for employee accounts and a larger reach boost. Pricing varies by country and has changed before, so confirm at checkout.
For most small and mid-sized brands, standard X Premium on the main account is the right starting point. The gold checkmark makes sense when you need affiliated employee accounts, run a large ad budget, or operate in a category where impersonation is a real risk (financial services, healthcare, customer support).
Profile basics that still matter:
- Bio: 160 characters. Lead with what you do and who it is for. Include one link.
- Display name: 50 characters. Use your brand name, not a tagline.
- Header image: 1500 x 500 pixels (3:1). Refresh it for campaigns, launches and seasonal moments.
- Profile photo: 400 x 400 pixels, displayed as a circle. Use a logo mark that reads at thumbnail size.
- Pin a post. Your pinned post is the first thing a profile visitor sees after your bio, so pin your current campaign, best explainer or most-engaged post and update it monthly.
Content Formats and Post Types
The 280-character post is still the core unit of X, and for good reason: only the first 280 characters of any post show in the timeline before the “Show more” fold, no matter how long the post actually is. Write to the fold. The first line has to earn the tap.
A note on benchmarks: X is a reach platform, not an engagement platform. The Quid (formerly Rival IQ) 2026 benchmark, which measures engagements as a share of followers, puts the all-industry median at 0.03% per post, double the 2024 low but still the lowest of any major platform. Impressions, link clicks, replies and profile visits are the metrics that matter on X, not likes per follower.
Short text posts
Still the workhorse. Take a clear position, ask a real question, or share one specific insight. Text posts earn the most impressions of any format because they load instantly and read fast in a feed that is mostly text.
Best practices:
- One idea per post. Save the second idea for the next post.
- Lead with the hook, not the setup. Put the payoff in the first line.
- Skip filler openers (“We’re excited to announce…”). The algorithm reads the post, and so do people.
- Write how you talk. X rewards a human voice more than any other platform.
Long posts (Premium only)
Any paid tier can publish posts up to 25,000 characters. These are useful for explainers, announcements with detail, and point-of-view pieces that would otherwise be a thread. Readers see the first 280 characters and a “Show more” link, so the opening still has to work as a standalone post.
Threads
Threads remain one of the best-performing organic formats for brands because each post in the chain is a fresh entry point and the format invites replies. With the model now reading full threads, padding hurts: a tight five-post thread with a distinct point in each beats a rambling fifteen-post one.
Best practices:
- First post must stand alone and promise a payoff.
- Number the posts (1/, 2/) so readers know how long it is.
- One image or chart per post where it helps. Mixed media threads hold attention longer.
- End with a question or a clear next step, and reply to your own thread with a link if you need one (see the section on links below).
Images
Posts with images consistently outperform text-only posts on engagement, and up to four images can be attached to a single post.
Best practices:
- 1200 x 675 pixels (16:9) for a single landscape image; 1080 x 1080 (1:1) for square. Portrait images display at 4:5 on mobile.
- Keep file size under 5 MB. JPG, PNG and WebP are supported; GIFs up to 15 MB.
- Add alt text. It is an accessibility requirement and it gives the ranking model a text description of the image.
- Multi-image posts crop into a grid, so keep the key content centered.
Native video
X is pushing hard into video and native video reliably earns more engagement than text alone. Upload directly rather than linking to YouTube.
Best practices:
- Free accounts: up to 140 seconds and 512 MB. X Premium subscribers can upload up to 4 hours at 1080p (16 GB) on web and iOS.
- Recommended: 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080 for 16:9 landscape; 1080 x 1920 for 9:16 vertical; 1080 x 1080 for square. Any ratio from 1:3 to 3:1 is accepted.
- MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio is the safe export. HEVC and MOV files fail more often.
- Autoplay is muted. Burn in captions or upload an SRT file. The first three seconds need to work with no sound.
- Short still wins for brands. Aim for 15 to 60 seconds on most posts. Save long uploads for interviews, webinars and event recordings where the audience has opted in.
Polls
Polls run up to seven days and remain an easy way to generate replies and repeat visits. Keep the question short, keep the options to two or three, and post the results as a follow-up.
Articles (Premium)
Articles are X’s long-form publishing surface, available to Premium and above subscribers and to Premium Business accounts. They support headers, formatted text, embedded media, and up to 100,000 characters, and they live on your profile under their own tab. Think of them as a blog post that lives on X. They are a good home for thought leadership, event recaps and how-to content, and they can be promoted with a short post that links to them (an internal link, so it is not penalized the way an external one is).
Live video and Spaces
Spaces (live audio) and live video broadcasts are available to all accounts and are useful for Q&As, launches and event coverage. Replays are saved and can be clipped into short posts afterwards. Announce them at least a day ahead and pin the announcement.
Posting Cadence and Timing
X still rewards frequency more than any other platform, but the bar has moved. The old advice of three to five posts a day was built for a chronological feed. In a ranked feed with a 48-hour shelf life, two or three strong original posts a day, plus active replying, beats a dozen filler posts. For reference, the Quid 2026 benchmark puts the all-industry median for brand accounts at about 2.2 posts per week, which is why consistent accounts stand out so easily.
Cadence
- 1 to 3 original posts per day is ideal
- 3 to 5 per week minimum to stay in the ranking pool
- Replies and quote posts on top of that, every day you post
- Re-share your best evergreen content every few weeks; most of your audience did not see it the first time
Posting times
The large 2026 studies agree on the shape of the week and disagree on the hour. Sprout Social’s 2026 analysis of nearly 2 billion engagements found the strongest window is Tuesday through Thursday, 12 to 6 p.m., with Monday peaking 2 to 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Buffer and Hootsuite, measuring which publish hour earns the most engagement per post, both point earlier, to 8 to 11 a.m. midweek. Every study ranks weekends and early mornings worst.
Our recommendation:
- Tuesday through Thursday are the strongest days; Monday is close
- Lead posts: 9 to 11 a.m. local time
- Second slot: 12 to 3 p.m. local time
- Avoid Saturdays and anything before 6 a.m.
(Post cadence and timing vary by industry and audience. Your own analytics will beat any benchmark within about 90 days.)
Engagement habits that drive reach
Because the algorithm weighs early replies so heavily, how you behave in the hour after posting matters as much as the post itself.
- Reply to every reply in the first hour. Each reply from the author extends the conversation and the post’s distribution.
- Spend 15 to 20 minutes a day replying to other accounts in your industry: customers, partners, journalists, event organizers. Thoughtful replies on larger accounts are the fastest organic growth lever on X today.
- Quote posts beat reposts. A repost does not reach non-followers through ranking; a quote post with your own take is a new original post.
- Bookmarks count. Content people want to save (checklists, data, how-tos) earns a signal that likes do not.
- Pin your best-performing post of the week on Friday so weekend profile visitors see it.
Hashtags and Links on X
Both of these have changed enough that old habits now work against you.
Hashtags
X no longer needs hashtags to understand what a post is about. The ranking model reads the post itself, and Elon Musk has told users directly that the system does not need them. Since June 27, 2025, hashtags are banned in all X ads; a promoted post containing one is rejected.
For organic posts, hashtags still work as a search and discovery tool for live events and campaigns, and that is the only place we recommend them.
- Use zero hashtags on standard posts. Write the keyword into the sentence instead.
- Use one hashtag for a live event, conference, broadcast or branded campaign where people are actively searching the tag.
- Never use more than two. Posts stacked with hashtags read as spam to both the model and the reader.
- Nothing in a post you plan to boost. Build the organic post without hashtags so it is eligible for promotion later.
Links
For years the standard advice was to keep external links out of the post and drop them in the first reply, because X cut reach on link posts. In July 2026, X’s head of product and Musk both stated publicly that X no longer penalizes posts with links and that the reply workaround is unnecessary. The open-sourced ranking code has no explicit link penalty.
That said, link posts still tend to underperform on engagement for a simpler reason: when someone taps a link, they leave the post and do not like, reply or repost. The model does not predict link clicks as a positive action, so a bare link with no reason to react earns little distribution either way.
Our recommendation:
- A link in the post body is fine. Stop hiding links in replies by default.
- Never post a bare link. Lead with the insight, the stat or the take, then the link. Give people a reason to reply before they click.
- Make sure your site has a strong link preview (the twitter:image or og:image meta tag, 1200 x 675 pixels). A post with a good card image performs like an image post.
- Prefer native formats when the goal is reach: upload the video, post the chart, write the Article. Link out when the goal is traffic, and measure link clicks, not likes.
- Internal links (to your own X posts, Articles or Spaces) carry none of the engagement drag of external ones.
Other things that quietly cost reach
- Posting the same text repeatedly. The model filters duplicates and previously-seen posts.
- Engagement bait (“like if you agree”). Mutes and “not interested” taps are weighted negative signals.
- Unverified account status. Verified accounts are prioritized in replies and search.
- Cross-posting content formatted for another platform, with Instagram-style hashtag blocks or LinkedIn-length copy.
Paid Promotion on X
X Ads is a narrower tool than it was a few years ago, but it still works well when your audience already lives on X: B2B and tech, finance, healthcare and medical device, news and media, sports, and live events. Costs are typically lower than Meta or LinkedIn for comparable reach, and the self-serve platform at ads.x.com is easy to run from a desktop browser.
Ad formats worth knowing
- Promoted Ads: the core format. An organic-looking post (text, image, video or carousel) with a small “Ad” label. X’s creative specs call for 280 characters of copy, 16:9 or 1:1 media for the timeline, and no hashtags.
- Vertical Video Ads: full-screen 9:16 video (1080 x 1920) with sound on by default, served in X’s immersive video feed. This is X’s fastest-growing ad surface and the one it is pushing hardest. Keep it to about 15 seconds, show movement and branding in the first second, and build it vertical rather than cropping a landscape cut.
- Carousel Ads: two to six swipeable image or video cards with one caption and CTA. Good for product lineups, feature walkthroughs and multi-step stories.
- Collection and Dynamic Product Ads: a hero image or video with product tiles beneath it, with dynamic ads pulling from a product catalog. These are for e-commerce retargeting.
- Amplify Pre-Roll: short video ads that run before premium publisher video in categories like sports, news and entertainment. The brand-safe option for video reach.
- Takeovers: Timeline Takeover and Trend Takeover put your brand in the first ad slot of the For You feed or at the top of Explore for 24 hours. These are managed, fixed-price buys for launch days, not everyday spend.
Boosting organic posts
The simplest paid play on X is promoting an organic post that already performed. Because X Ads uses the same post, the social proof (replies, reposts) travels with it. Pick posts that earned replies, not just impressions, and remove any hashtags before boosting. Boosted posts work best with a narrow audience: keyword targeting around your category, follower lookalikes of competitors and trade publications, and event targeting around conferences or broadcasts.
Targeting
X’s targeting leans on the conversation graph rather than demographics: keywords people post and engage with, accounts they follow, interests, events, and custom audiences from your CRM or site pixel. X now offers an Optimized Targeting option that lets its model expand the audience from a seed. It works well for awareness and video views; for conversion campaigns, start narrow and let the data argue for expansion.
Measurement
The X Pixel and Conversions API handle site-side attribution, and verified accounts get a fuller analytics dashboard at x.com/i/account_analytics (impressions, engagements, profile visits, link clicks, video views, and follower change). Report on impressions, link clicks and replies for organic; cost per link click, video completion rate and cost per conversion for paid. Engagement rate against followers is a poor yardstick on X and will make every campaign look worse than it is.
X Growth Opportunities
Reply your way in. Replies on larger accounts in your industry are the single most reliable organic growth tactic on X right now. A sharp reply on a post with 50,000 views gets seen by more people than most brand posts ever will, and it introduces your account to exactly the audience you want. Budget 15 minutes a day for it.
Be the first with the take. X is where news breaks, and the audience rewards speed plus a point of view. Build a short list of the accounts, publications and hashtags that matter in your category, check them daily, and have a lightweight approval process so you can respond the same hour rather than the same week.
Turn one asset into five posts. A webinar becomes a 45-second clip, a stat card, a short take, a poll and an Article. A ranked feed with a 48-hour shelf life needs volume, and repurposing is how you get it without burning out your team.
Use Articles for the content you would otherwise link out. If the goal is to be read rather than to drive traffic, publishing natively keeps readers inside X, earns the engagement signals the model wants, and still lets you include links at the end.
Put people in front of the brand. Posts from a named employee, founder or expert consistently outperform the brand handle. Pair the company account with one or two affiliated personal accounts and quote-post between them.
Pin, re-share, repeat. Your best post from last quarter was seen by a fraction of your followers. Re-share evergreen content on a rotation, update the pinned post monthly, and treat every strong post as a template for the next one.
The Short Version
- Verify the account. Standard X Premium is enough for most brands.
- Post 1 to 3 original posts a day, Tuesday through Thursday first, late morning and early afternoon.
- Write to the fold: the first 280 characters have to earn the tap.
- Prioritize native video and images; keep video short and captioned.
- Reply to every reply in the first hour, and spend time replying to others daily.
- Drop the hashtags. Use at most one for a live event, none in ads.
- Links are fine in the post again, but never post a bare link.
- Measure impressions, link clicks and replies, not likes per follower.
If you would like help building or refreshing your brand’s presence on X, get in touch.
