CEO of PostOwl
X Advanced Search: Find Posts Worth Replying To
Your reply was good. It got 41 views.
Your writing was fine. The post you picked was the problem. You replied three hours late, and 200 comments were already sitting above yours.
X advanced search fixes the picking part. It is the same search box you already use, plus a few short commands that filter posts by likes, age, and language. Ten minutes with it beats an hour of scrolling.
The post you pick decides more than the words you write
A reply gets read while people are still reading the post. That window is short. On most posts the comment section stops moving after a few hours.
So you want two things at once. A post big enough to have an audience. And young enough that the audience is still there.
Your timeline gives you neither. It shows what the algorithm picked for you, and a lot of that is already old and already crowded.
Search lets you set the rules yourself.
Five X advanced search commands worth learning
Type these straight into the search box on x.com. They stack, so you can use several in one query.
min_faves:200shows only posts with 200 likes or more. Change the number to fit your niche.from:usernameshows posts from one account. Useful for checking which of your own posts did best.lang:enkeeps the results in one language.-filter:replieshides replies, so you only see original posts.-filter:linkshides posts that only share a link.
One naming detail confuses a lot of people. On the website the like filter is min_faves, not min_likes. The second one is the API name (the version built for software, not for the search box) and it returns nothing when you type it on the site.
There is also filter:follows, which limits results to accounts you already follow. Save that one for later. Early on you want strangers.
A query you can copy right now
Say you write about bootstrapped software. Try this:
bootstrapped saas min_faves:100 -filter:replies -filter:links lang:en
Now switch the tab from Top to Latest. Top gives you the all time winners, which are usually dead. Latest gives you posts from the last few hours that already have likes. Those are the ones you want.
Too many results? Raise the number to 300. Too few? Drop it to 30.
Every niche has a different bar. In a small niche, 30 likes is a big post and the author will read every reply. In a broad niche, 30 likes is noise.
Want only today? Add since:2026-08-30 with today's date in that year-month-day format.
Save five searches and stop deciding every morning
Write five queries once, one per subtopic you care about. Bookmark them in your browser, or keep them in a note.
Your morning is now a checklist instead of a decision. Open query one, reply to two posts. Open query two. Fifteen minutes, done.
Three queries is enough to start. One for your main topic. One for a phrase people use when they have the problem you solve, like "anyone know a tool". One for the name of a product next to yours, so you can be helpful where its users already gather.
The hard part is not finding posts. It is writing the reply before the moment passes. PostOwl has a Chrome extension for that: it drafts a reply in your own voice while you stay on the post, because it learned your style from posts you already wrote.
What separates a reply that grows you from one that sinks
Being early is half the work. The other half is saying something the post did not already say.
Add a number from your own work. Give one counter example. Tell what happened when you tried it and it failed.
"Great post" gets nothing. Agreement with no new information gets nothing. A short story with a real detail gets profile visits, and profile visits are where follows come from. There is more on the wording itself in how to write X replies that get noticed.
Two habits that waste the whole method
First, only replying to huge accounts. A post with 5,000 likes already has 400 replies, and yours lands at position 401. Keep a mix. Half your replies should go to posts in the 50 to 300 like range, where you can sit near the top for hours.
Second, running a search once and never saving it. The value is in the repeat. A query you run every day for a month teaches you which accounts reply back, which topics move, and which hours are quiet.
Search and lists work well together, by the way. Search finds new people. Lists keep the ones who turned out to be worth your time, and there is a full method for that in the X lists guide.
Start with one query today
Pick one topic. Run it with min_faves:100, switch to Latest, and reply to three posts that are under two hours old.
Check the view count on those three replies tomorrow. Compare them to your last three timeline replies. That number will tell you whether to keep going, and it usually does.