How to make a Twitter (X) thread

A thread is a set of posts you publish as one connected chain. The feature is built into the composer, and X now labels the individual entries "posts," not tweets. Here is the whole flow, which is the same on web and in the mobile apps apart from where you start.

1. Open the composer and write the first post. On the web, click the Post button. On iOS or Android, tap the compose icon. A free account caps each post at 280 characters (for exactly what counts toward that, see the X character limit reference).

2. Tap the plus (+) icon to add the next post. The plus icon stays greyed out until you have typed something, then it highlights. Each tap adds another empty post to the chain below the one you are on.

3. Keep adding, and trim any post that runs long. If a post goes over 280 characters, X highlights the overflow text so you can cut it before publishing.

4. Delete a single post or the whole draft. While drafting, the gray delete icon removes just that one post; the blue delete icon scraps the entire draft thread.

5. Tap Post all. Every post publishes at once, linked together as a thread. You do not have to post them one at a time.

Each post in the thread can carry its own media (up to 4 photos, or 1 GIF, or 1 video), and media does not count against the 280-character limit.

Save it as a draft: on mobile, tap the delete icon and choose to save instead. Thread drafts show the post count, so you can tell a five-post thread from a single-post draft. On the web, single-post drafts and scheduling live under "Unsent posts" in the composer; saving a full multi-post thread as a draft is a mobile flow.

Add to a thread after it is posted: yes, and you do not have to plan the whole thing up front. On the web, open the thread's detail page and click "Add another post" (only you see that prompt). On mobile, open the composer, pull down, and tap "Continue Thread" to append to your most recent post.

Free accounts can only thread. A long single post is a Premium feature capped at 25,000 characters, so without Premium a thread is your only way past 280. If you do have Premium, the choice comes down to what the content wants:

• Sequential content (a tutorial, a step-by-step, a story that builds): thread. Each post is a beat the reader can follow, skim, and bookmark on its own.
• A single argument, essay, or announcement you want read in one place: one long post. It keeps the dwell time and the replies on one object instead of splitting them across five.

One catch applies either way: the timeline truncates a long post at about 280 characters with a "Show more" link, and each post in a thread shows only its first stretch in-feed, so the opening line still has to earn the tap. We go deeper on the format choice in long-form X posts: when to use 25,000 chars vs 280.

The claim every thread guide repeats is that each post is "another shot at the feed." That is half true, and X's open-sourced ranking code shows exactly where it breaks.

What is true: every post in your thread is its own ranked object with its own ID, and X's Home ranker pulls replies into feeds by default (its in-network settings include replies). So your second, third, and fourth posts can each surface on their own, and each can be liked, bookmarked, or quoted separately. That is more surface area, spread across different people and across time.

Where it breaks: a thread post is technically a reply, and replies take a haircut. In the open-sourced code, thread posts run through a reply rescoring factor of 0.75, an author-diversity decay (a 0.5 factor down to a 0.25 floor) that attenuates repeated posts from the same author in one person's feed, and a filter that de-duplicates branches of the same conversation. Five posts do not equal five equal shots in front of the same scroller. It is broader reach across an audience, not multiplied reach to one reader.

The multiplier numbers are misread. You will see "a reply is worth 13.5" or "a self-reply is worth 150x a like." Those come from Twitter's 2023 weight snapshot, and they are coefficients on predicted-engagement probabilities, not reach exchange rates. The "150x" is just 75.0 divided by 0.5, and that 75.0 weight measures a viewer replying and the author engaging that reply, which is not the same thing as replying to yourself. In January 2026 xAI replaced the 2023 ranker with a Grok-based rewrite and the numeric weights are redacted, so any current "each post is worth Nx" figure is a guess. The mechanics are in how the X algorithm works.

And "your own replies are in-network" is backwards. In the code, in-network is defined relative to the viewer, not to you. For anyone who does not already follow you, your thread posts are out-of-network and take an extra penalty on top of the reply haircut.

The honest verdict: threads are not dead in 2026, but the twenty-post mega-thread and the "a thread:" bait hook are. X now penalizes accounts that repeatedly (three or more times) solicit engagement, cutting them from revenue sharing or suspending them, with Grok as the classifier, and the only on-record guidance from leadership points the other way. Elon Musk said in 2023 that people should post long-form content directly on the platform, and X's 2026 changes surface genuine replies and conversation. Nobody in charge has said "stop threading." The penalty is on bait, not on the format. Thread when the content is genuinely sequential, and skip it when you are only chasing a multiplier that no longer exists.

The first post does most of the work, because it is usually the only one a non-follower sees before deciding whether to tap. Buffer's (small, 2018) thread experiment found engagement concentrated on the opening post and tapered after it, which matches the mechanics: the first post is the candidate everyone's feed can see, and the rest depend on the tap. Write the first post as if it were a single post you would be happy to publish on its own.

Numbering is a style call, not a rule. Adding "1/" or "1/7" tells a reader how much is left and helps when a middle post surfaces alone, but manual numbers break the moment you add or delete a post. If you number, do it last, or let a tool handle it.

There is no magic length. Every "5 to 7 posts, 70% completion" figure floating around is a vendor claim with no method attached. Make the thread as long as the idea needs and no longer. Each post should earn its place or get cut.

End on one ask, not five. "Follow for more" plus "like the first post" plus "reply with yours" plus a link splits the reader's attention four ways. Pick the single action that matters most.

Fit each post. Every post still caps at 280, and the same edits that pull one draft under the limit apply to all of them: see the five edits that pull a draft under 280. When we built our free X post formatter, we made the splitter break on word boundaries rather than mid-word, because a thread that snaps a word in half reads worse than one slightly longer post. To judge whether the hook actually landed, watch the first post's impressions before you read anything into the numbers on the rest.

Editing. You can edit a post only with X Premium, within a one-hour window, up to five times, and only from the device you posted it from. Editing applies to original posts and quotes. Treat the window as a safety net, not a workflow: plan the thread before you tap Post all.

Deleting. You can only delete your own posts, one at a time. Known behavior, which X does not document: deleting a post in the middle of a published thread breaks the chain at that point, so the posts after the gap survive as standalone replies into a now-missing parent. Deleting the first post orphans the rest the same way. If a live thread has a mistake, it is usually cleaner to add a correcting post at the end than to delete one in the middle. You can also extend or revive a thread by quote-tweeting one of its posts with a follow-up.

How long can a thread be. X's own docs set no numeric cap. The composer lets you queue roughly 25 posts at once and prompts you to add more after posting, and once it is live you can keep appending indefinitely. The "20-post limit" some guides cite is not a real platform rule.

Reading a long one. There is no native "unroll" on X. To read a long thread as a single page, reply to or quote any post in it with "@threadreaderapp unroll" and the bot sends back a link, or paste a post's URL into the box at threadreaderapp.com. X's built-in Grok "Summarize" option returns a bullet summary instead of an unroll, and it now sits behind a paid tier.

Posting the thread is only half of it. A thread starts a conversation, and the replies and quotes it pulls in are where the actual engagement happens, which is the case for getting more engagement on X in general.