Short copy, written tightly
Standard accounts get 280 characters per post. Premium accounts can post more, but long posts are cut short in the timeline, so the point still has to come first. Every link counts as 23 characters whatever its length, and each hashtag or mention spends characters the idea needs. One thought per post, concrete nouns and a verb doing the work beat a stack of hashtags. Generated drafts help most when the brief asks for genuinely different angles, such as a fact, a question to the audience or a reply to a known complaint, and a person picks the one that sounds like the brand's own voice.
Media that holds the timeline
A post can carry up to four images; X's ad specs recommend 1:1 at 1200x1200 and 1.91:1 at 1200x628, and also accept 16:9 at 1920x1080. Video runs to 2 minutes 20 seconds on standard accounts and plays muted by default, so burned-in captions carry the message. Each image can take up to 1,000 characters of alt text, and screen-reader users notice when it is missing. Images on X are routinely screenshotted and quoted out of context, so avoid visuals whose meaning flips when cropped: a product beside a slogan, a face beside a claim, or a chart without its axis.
Real time is where brands get hurt
The classic failures are all real-time: a scheduled promotion that goes out during a tragedy, a generated joke about an event that has turned serious, or an automated reply to a hashtag whose meaning shifted overnight. Pause the schedule when major news breaks, check what a hashtag is being used for right now, and have a person approve anything topical. Synthetic images of real events carry particular risk. X's rules on synthetic and manipulated media let it restrict the reach of deceptive media or have it removed, and Community Notes can attach public corrections to posts, ads included, where everyone who sees the ad will read them.
Adjacency, verification and preparation
For paid posts, X offers controls over the content ads appear next to and supports third-party brand-safety verification, but the thresholds are the brand's decision: which topics to avoid, which keywords to exclude, which accounts never to appear near. Write them down before a campaign, not during a crisis. The prepared part of the job is where the studio fits: approved image and video sets in X's formats, copy variants inside 280 characters with banned words enforced, and approvals with an audit trail, so the team's live judgement is spent on timing and tone rather than on production.
Updated 25 September 2026