Straight answer: tap the three dots on your own post, choose “Pin to your profile,” and it sits at the top of your X profile until you unpin it or pin something else over it. It takes ten seconds. The part everyone gets wrong is what they pin and why they think it will do more than it does.
I’ve pinned dozens of posts over the years, celebrating a Forbes mention, a book launch, hitting a speaking milestone, closing a client win I was proud of. Some of those pins did real work for my business. Most of them just sat there looking nice. The difference wasn’t luck, it was understanding what a pinned post is for.
The step-by-step
On desktop or mobile, this is exactly what to do:
- Go to your own profile and find the post you want to pin
- Click or tap the three dots (the “more” icon) in the top right of that post
- Select “Pin to your profile”
- Confirm when the pop-up asks if you’re sure
- Refresh your profile page and check it’s sitting at the very top, above your most recent posts
To unpin later, same process: three dots, “Unpin from profile.” You can only pin one post at a time, so if you already have something pinned and you want to swap it for your milestone announcement, you don’t need to unpin the old one first. Pinning the new post automatically replaces it.
One thing that trips people up: you can only pin your own original posts or your own reposts, not a reply someone else wrote about you, even if that reply is the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about your business. If you want to showcase someone else’s praise, quote-post it yourself, then pin your quote.
What counts as a “milestone” worth pinning
Not everything that feels big to you lands as big to someone landing on your profile for the first time. I’ve seen businesses pin things like “we hit 10,000 followers” and get almost no engagement, because follower counts don’t tell a stranger anything useful about whether to trust them or buy from them.
The milestones that work are the ones that answer an unspoken question a new visitor has: can I trust this business, and is it going anywhere. Things like a five-year anniversary post with a specific number attached (“5 years, 1,200 clients, still a two-person team”), a press mention from a recognisable outlet, a client result with a real figure in it, or a product launch with a working link.
When I hit the point where I’d been listed on Forbes as one of the top social media influencers to follow, I didn’t pin a screenshot of the mention on its own. I pinned a post that said what the list was, why it mattered for small businesses, and what I’d done to earn it. That context turned a vanity screenshot into something a stranger could act on, and it stayed pinned for about four months because it kept doing quiet work every time someone new checked my profile before booking a call.
The uncomfortable bit nobody tells you
Here’s what most guides on this topic won’t say plainly: pinning a post does not boost it in the algorithm, does not push it into more people’s timelines, and does not notify your existing followers that you’ve pinned something. X’s algorithm treats a pinned post exactly the same as any other post the moment it’s published, in terms of reach. Pinning changes nothing about how many people see it when it first goes live.
What pinning does is control what people see when they visit your profile directly, after clicking your name from a reply, after finding you through a Google search, after someone forwards your handle in a DM. That’s a smaller, more deliberate audience than your feed followers, but it’s often a warmer one, because they’ve chosen to look you up.
So if your milestone post gets 40 likes on the day you publish it and then you pin it hoping it’ll suddenly take off, it won’t. What it will do is keep converting a small trickle of profile visitors, week after week, long after the original post has scrolled into oblivion for everyone else. That’s a completely different job to going viral, and treating it like a reach tactic is the single biggest reason business owners get disappointed with pinning.
How long to leave it pinned
There’s no fixed rule from X on this, but from running my own profile and watching client accounts, I’d say three to six weeks is the sweet spot for a milestone announcement before it starts feeling stale to repeat visitors. Anything left up for six months plus starts to read as “this business hasn’t had anything worth saying since,” which is the opposite of the impression you want.
If your milestone post includes a call to action, a link to book a call, download something, or join a waitlist, check its click numbers weekly through X’s own analytics on that post. Once clicks drop off noticeably (for most small accounts that’s somewhere in the second or third week), it’s done its job and it’s time to swap it for whatever’s next, even if that’s just your best-performing normal post from the last month.
What to write in the post before you pin it
The post itself matters more than the act of pinning it. A few things I’ve found consistently work:
Lead with the number, not the buildup. “3 years, 500 customers, one product” beats three sentences of preamble before you get to the point. People decide whether to keep reading in about a second on X.
Include a visual if you have one, a photo, a simple graphic with the stat, or a short video. Text-only pinned posts get scrolled past far more on profile visits than posts with an image attached, in my own experience running client accounts.
Add a link if there’s somewhere useful to send people, whether that’s your site, a newsletter signup, or a case study. A pinned post with no next step is a dead end even when it’s well written.
If you want a good model of how a milestone post with a strong hook and a clear ask performs, it’s worth looking at how brands like Bumble have built momentum around specific moments rather than vague brand statements, as I’ve broken down in this look at Bumble’s marketing strategy. The principle transfers directly to a pinned post: specific moment, specific number, specific ask.
Mistakes I see most often
Pinning a thread instead of a single clear post. Threads work in the feed but they ask too much of someone landing on your profile cold. Pin the strongest single tweet from the thread and link to the rest if you want.
Pinning something with a broken or expired link. I’ve seen businesses pin a launch announcement, the offer ends, and the pinned post keeps sending people to a dead page for weeks because nobody remembered to check it.
Pinning a milestone with no context for someone who’s never heard of the business before. “We just hit our biggest month ever” means nothing without a number and without saying what the business does. Assume every profile visitor knows nothing about you, because a good chunk of them don’t.
Forgetting to update it. This is the one that costs the most quietly. I’ve audited accounts where the pinned post was celebrating something from over a year ago, while more recent, more impressive milestones sat buried in the regular feed. If you’re serious about using X as part of your social proof strategy, treat your pinned post like a shop window display, not a plaque you put up once and forget.
Where pinning fits into a wider X strategy
A pinned post is one small lever in a much bigger toolkit that most businesses only half use. X still has a handful of underused features worth building into your routine, and I’ve gone through the ones worth your time in this rundown of X features you should be using now. Even features that have technically been retired, like the old Moments tool, still teach useful lessons about grouping content around a theme, which I cover in this piece on what Twitter Moments got right.
If you’re pinning a milestone as part of a bigger push, don’t treat X in isolation. The same milestone announcement should go out to your email list the same week, because email consistently outperforms social for actual conversions on niche offers, something I’ve written about in how niche businesses can use email marketing to reach the right customers. Your pinned post catches the cold visitor. Your email catches the warm one. You need both.
And if you want the wider context for how social platforms are being used by businesses right now, including where X sits against everything else, the stats in this collection of social media facts are worth a scan before you decide how much weight to put on any one platform.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pin more than one post at a time on X?
No. X only allows one pinned post per profile at any given time. Pinning a new post automatically replaces whatever was pinned before it, so you don’t need to manually unpin the old one first.
Does pinning a post help it show up more in other people’s feeds?
No, and this is the part most guides skip. Pinning has zero effect on the algorithm’s reach for that post. It only controls what people see when they visit your profile directly, not what shows up in anyone’s timeline.
Should I pin a milestone post or a sales offer?
Pin whichever one is currently doing you the most good. If you’ve just hit a real milestone, pin that with a clear number and a link, since proof tends to convert cold visitors better than a direct offer. Swap in a sales-focused pin only when you have a live, time-sensitive offer worth the space.
How do I know if my pinned post is working?
Check the post’s own analytics on X for link clicks and profile visit follow-through over a few weeks. If clicks flatten out or the post is more than a couple of months old, it’s time to update it, even if nothing has technically gone wrong with it.
Beyond pinning a single post, you can group your highlights with Twitter Moments to keep your best updates in one scrollable story.
