⚡ TL;DR
- • Posts with links on X get 0% engagement for regular accounts (Buffer, 2025).
- • Image posts get 2× the engagement of link posts even on Premium accounts.
- • Visual content = reach. No image = algorithmic silence.
- • Bragly lets you turn any milestone into a shareable image card — so your post actually lands.
The Algo Has Spoken — And It Doesn't Like Your Link
You spent 20 minutes crafting the perfect post. You drop in the link. You hit publish. And then... nothing.
This isn't bad luck — it's by design. Buffer analyzed 18.8 million posts from 71,000 X accounts and found something stark: posts with links on regular accounts now have a 0% engagement rate. Not low. Not declining. Zero. After March 2025, link posts from non-Premium accounts are effectively invisible — algorithmically buried before a single person scrolls past them.
The platform wants you to stay on the platform. Every link out is a threat to that. So it simply stops showing your post.
The Format Hierarchy on 𝕏
Not all post formats are treated equally. Here's how engagement actually breaks down across post types, for both regular and Premium accounts:
Engagement Rate by Format
Data: Buffer analysis of 18.8M posts · Aug 2025
Images are not the best-performing format in raw numbers — text and video beat them. But images are the most accessible format for founders. You can't always make a video. You can't always write a perfectly optimized thread. You can always make a card. That's the practical edge.
Why Images Work (Even When the Algorithm Isn't the Reason)
There's a human layer underneath the algorithmic one. Images break scroll inertia. A wall of text is skippable — your brain can decide in 80ms that it's not worth reading. A well-designed card stops thumbs. It creates a visual anchor in a feed engineered to blur into noise.
The human brain processes visual information 60,000× faster than text. That's not a platform rule — it's biology. You can't out-algorithm biology.
Make it concrete: when you hit a milestone — $1K MRR, 100 users, first paying customer — a plain text tweet gets a like from your mom. A designed card gets reshared by strangers who don't know you, don't follow you, and have no reason to care — except the card made them stop. That's how reach compounds.
The Gap Most Founders Don't Fix
The difference isn't the milestone. It's the packaging. Here's what the same announcement looks like with and without a visual:
Same achievement. Completely different result. The text post gets lost in the feed. The card gets shared by people who weren't even following you.
What This Means for You
- →The platform will keep changing its rules. What won't change: humans respond to visuals. Build for that layer, not just the algorithmic one.
- →Your milestone is worth announcing. Don't bury it in a link post that nobody sees. The work is done — make the post match the effort.
- →You don't need a design background. You don't need Figma. You don't need a designer on retainer. You need a card.
That's exactly what Bragly is for. Turn your next milestone into something people actually share.