How to quote tweet on X (Twitter)

The steps are the same on every device, and the only thing that trips people up is the label. X no longer calls this a "quote tweet." In the app it is Repost as Quote, and the thing you make is a quote post. The rest of the internet, including this article's title, still says "quote tweet" because that is what people search for. Same action, older name.

You can attach media to the comment, and X is specific about how much: its own help doc says you can include one GIF, up to four photos, or a video. Not a mix. The comment itself follows the normal post limit, so you get 280 characters on a free account and up to 25,000 with X Premium. If your take runs long and you are wrestling it under 280, the same trimming moves in writing tweets that fit apply, or paste it into the free X post formatter first.

These three buttons look interchangeable and are not. The difference is where the engagement goes and who sees it, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason a good take gets no traction. The short version: reply to join a conversation, repost to share something as-is, quote to add your own spin and keep the engagement on you.

The line that matters most is in the middle row. A plain repost sends people to the original, and every like it earns is credited there. A quote makes something new that belongs to you. That is why creators quote instead of repost when they have anything at all to say: they want the post in their own feed, working for their own reach.

A quote post behaves like any post you write from scratch. It lands on your profile and shows up in your followers' feeds. It gathers its own likes, replies, and quotes, and the post you quoted sits embedded inside it as a reference. Four details behind that are worth knowing, because they change how you use the feature.

1. The author is notified, but not dragged into your replies. When you quote someone, they get a notification that you did. But X is explicit that when other people reply to your quote post, the original author "will not be automatically added to the conversation." If you want them in the thread, you have to @mention them. This is the detail almost no guide mentions, and it matters: a quote is not a back-channel to the author, it is a broadcast to your audience about their post.
2. You cannot quote a protected account. If someone has a private (protected) account, the Repost icon is disabled on their posts and pasting the link will not produce an embed. Nobody can quote them, not even their approved followers. If your own account is protected, the quotes you make are only visible to your approved followers, which defeats most of the point.
3. You can quote your own posts. X suggests this for resurfacing an older post that became relevant again, or adding context to one of your own replies. It is a clean way to update a post without deleting and reposting, since the original keeps its likes and the quote adds the new context on top.
4. "Quote in a DM" is not a thing. People search for it, but there is no quote option inside direct messages. What you want there is the Share icon (the arrow pointing up out of a box), then "Send via Direct Message," which drops the post into a private thread instead of your public feed.

The reason quoting beats plain reposting for growth is that X's ranking system treats your quote as original content. It gets scored like any post you wrote, with its own shot at the For You feed, rather than passing that value back to the post you shared. Borrowing a bigger account's post as your starting point, then adding a take people want to respond to, is one of the most reliable ways to reach past your own follower count.

It helps to know what the ranking system actually pays for. When Twitter open-sourced its algorithm in 2023, the engagement weights were public: a reply was worth 13.5, a like 0.5, and a plain repost only 1.0. A reply the author then engages with was the heaviest positive signal at 75.0. In other words, the code rewarded posts that made people stop and respond, and a quote with a real opinion draws replies in a way a bare repost never does. You can see the full picture in how the X algorithm works, and the tactics that follow from it in what the algorithm actually rewards.

The honest version comes with two caveats. First, there was never a dedicated "quote tweet" weight in that code; a quote is scored as the original post it is, on its own likes and replies. Second, those numbers are from 2023. X replaced that entire system in January 2026 with a Grok-based model it calls Phoenix, and it did not publish the new weights. So anyone who tells you a quote tweet is worth exactly some multiple of a like in 2026 is guessing. The direction holds (posts that earn replies win), but the precise figures are a 2023 snapshot, not a current price list.

The same mechanic that borrows reach can turn on you, because a quote broadcasts the post you are quoting to a whole new audience. Quote something to dunk on it and you have just handed that take free distribution to everyone who follows you. This is the trap behind "the ratio," the moment a quote or reply pulls more engagement than the post it targets, which reads as the crowd siding against the original. The term dates to early 2017, when a user screenshotted a lopsided reply-to-like count on a Rep. Jason Chaffetz post on March 7, and Esquire named the phenomenon that April.

Two rules keep quotes on the right side of that line. Punch up, not down: quoting a large account to disagree is fair game and often good for you, while quoting a small account to mock it sends a pile-on at someone who cannot absorb it, and your own audience clocks the cruelty. And decide what outcome you actually want. If the goal is to change the author's mind, reply to them directly. Quoting is for talking to your audience about their post, not to the author.

One control worth knowing about, mostly because people assume it exists and it does not: X has no setting to stop others from quoting your posts. You can limit who is allowed to reply to a post, but quotes ignore that restriction entirely. (Threads, Meta's separate app, added a quote-control toggle; X has not.) If someone quotes you in bad faith, your options are to reply, to ignore it, or to report it if it breaks a rule, not to switch quotes off.

Every public quote of a post is countable and visible. Open the post, tap the reposts number (or the "Quote Tweets" link beneath it), and X shows you every quote of it in one place. That count has been part of the tweet display since X launched it as a separate metric on August 31, 2020, and it is still there in 2026. It is the fastest way to see how a post is being received, especially now that likes are private by default and the quote and reply counts are the most visible public signals a post carries.

Deleting a quote works like deleting any post, with one wrinkle. A plain repost has an "Undo Repost" that reverses it instantly. A quote does not, because it is a real post: open it, use the post menu, and delete it the way you would delete anything you wrote. Removing the quote does nothing to the original, which stays up under its author.

Quoting is a legitimate growth move, and it is also the favorite tool of engagement-bait and rage-farming accounts, which quote an inflammatory take purely to harvest the replies. The tactic has a name ("rage bait") because it is common enough to need one. When one of your posts gets quoted into a pile-on, a large share of the accounts piling on are not real people with opinions, they are bots and farm accounts working the same outrage loop.

That is where the honest product note fits. When we built BotBlock, the point was to score every account in your mentions so a manufactured pile-on is easy to tell apart from a genuine quote conversation before you spend a reply on it. You can do the same by hand using the bot signals (account age, follower ratio, a bio that reads like a template), which works fine until the volume climbs. Either way, the rule is the same: do not let a quote-tweet dogpile set your mood or your reply queue when most of it is not human.