Tips and tricks, labelled by how sure we are¶

Label	Meaning
Code	Follows from X's open-source ranker (xai-org/x-algorithm)
Help	Stated on an official X help page
Statement	Said publicly by X staff or its owner, not in code or help pages
Real	Seen on the maintainer's own account (flow/analytics-pattern.md); small base, a direction not a law
Practice	Common practice among builders; not proven, test it on your account

Writing¶

Code · Write for sharing: checklists, tools, surprising numbers. Copy-link share is the top-weighted action (20).
Code · End with a real question. Replies weigh 5; between mutual follows, 15 more.
Code · Don't post five times in an hour. Each extra post from you in a feed is decayed.
Code · A post has 48 hours in For You. Repurpose a good one weeks later with new words, never a copy.
Practice · First line = the whole post if nobody expands it. Put the number or the problem there.
Practice · One idea per post. Two ideas = two posts on two days.
Practice · Native video (screen recording with captions) for demos; GIFs for tiny UI details.
Practice · Lowercase, plain sentences read more human than polished marketing copy. Match your real voice.

Help · Reply prioritization: Basic < Premium (larger) < Premium+ (largest). Use it daily under bigger posts.
Help · Longer posts up to 25,000 characters. Put the payoff before the "Show more" cut.
Help · Edit a post within 1 hour (original posts and quotes). Fix typos instead of deleting and losing replies.
Help · Media Studio (Premium and up) to store and reuse demo clips.
Help · Don't change photo, name or @handle often: the checkmark goes away until re-review.
Statement · Articles (long-form, up to 25,000 characters, own tab on your profile) opened to every Premium tier on 2026-01-07, not only Premium+ (X Creators, PPC Land).
Practice · An Article is seen like any post: in followers' feeds and possibly For You in the first ~48 hours, then mostly through your profile's Articles tab, search and links. No public source says how For You ranks Articles, and creators have complained of low reach. So always post a short teaser (the payoff + one image) that links the Article, pin it for the week, and reuse it in replies where it answers a question.

Code · Link clicks weigh 0.2. A link is fine; the post just has to earn reach without the click.
Statement · July 2026: X's head of product said links no longer need to go in replies, and Musk said X hasn't penalized link posts "for over a year" (PPC Land). No formal announcement.
Practice · So test link-in-post vs. link-in-first-reply for a month on your own account; keep the winner.
Practice · One ask per seven posts. The pinned post carries the offer the rest of the time.
Practice · UTM on every link (utm_source=x&utm_medium=bio|post|reply), or you can't judge Premium's value.

Code · No hashtag signal in the ranker's weights; the model scores a post by predicted actions on its content, so it doesn't need tags to know what a post is about (x-algorithm-and-premium-facts.md).
Statement · Elon Musk asked users to stop using hashtags in late 2024, saying the system doesn't need them anymore and they look ugly (FOX 5 DC). The Grok screenshot he shared with it may have been edited, per the same report.
Help · Many unrelated hashtags, or trending hashtags used to hijack a conversation, count as spam under the Authenticity policy.
Practice · Use one only when a real community follows that tag (an event, a challenge, a niche that searches it). Otherwise 0. Plain keywords ("Mac app", "Claude Code") do the job.

"Premium makes every post go 10× further." Third-party correlation, not X data.
"Hashtags get you banned." Not in the code; just low value outside real communities.
"Post at 9am EST." Your audience's time zone matters more; test.