Twitter Embed Workaround (How to Make an Embedded Tweet in 2024) 🐤

Embedded tweets used to work in Substack posts. Now they're gone. But I have the solution

Substack is moving so fast, with new features and changes to existing features being delivered every month. It’s great if you are a Substack user, but not so great if you are writing a book about how to use Substack, because everything keeps changing.

What Substack’s new feature shipping process feels like to me (can’t keep up!):

@chipmonkbaking🤩🤩 we love it #cookies #cookiemachine #cookietok #sosatisfying #satisfying #behindthescenes #bakerylife #bakingtok #machines

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The clip above is from TikTok. Embedded TikToks and YouTubes are a nice way to add some colour and movement to a Substack post without having to create your own videos.

I used tweets in a similar way in my main Substack. But the feature that allows us to embed tweets is gone now. That sucks.

Here’s what an embedded tweet used to look like in a post:

An embedded tweet in a Substack post (the embed feature no longer works for Twitter)

Since Twitter and Substack had an argument in early April, the automatic embedding feature no longer works tweets. Now, if you paste a link to a tweet you get a ‘raw’ URL instead 😞.

What you get if you paste a tweet link into a Substack draft post, since April 2023

My workaround

I want to keep using Tweets, not least because my audience relies on me to collect interesting news for them, so they don’t have to waste their precious time hanging out with the dirty blue bird 🐤.

So I found a workaround. It’s not perfect but it’s not too bad.

To create a feature in your Substack post that looks and works like an embedded tweet, follow the steps below.

Step one

Take a screenshot of the tweet and paste it into your draft Substack post.

Step two

In your draft post, select the image by clicking it. You will see a blue line around the image. While the image is selected, click the link embed editing tool in the post editor ribbon. A link window will pop up.

Step three

Paste the tweet’s link into the pop-up window and click ‘Done’. This adds a link to the image, which will open when the image is clicked.

Hint: To find a tweet’s link, simply open it in a new browser tab and copy the URL that appears. On a smartphone, click the share icon and then choose ‘Copy link’.

The result

The result is an image that looks like a tweet, which, when clicked, opens the actual tweet on Twitter.

This is a screenshot of a tweet, which contains a hidden link

🐤🐤🐤🐤🐤

Hope this was helpful to you! If it was, please re-stack it to Notes by clicking the RE-STACK button. This will help other people to see it.

Have a great week.

Karen

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