How to Find Viral Tweets About Any Topic

To find viral tweets about a topic, search the topic with a high like threshold and no reposts, for example "remote work" min_faves:5000 -filter:retweets, then open the Top tab. Add since: to limit results to recent virality, and lower the threshold until you get enough posts to study.

A viral tweet is a post whose engagement is far above normal for its topic, so the threshold is relative: 500 likes is viral in a small niche and ordinary in sport or politics. The operators come from how to search tweets by likes, reposts and replies.

How Do You Search for Viral Tweets on X?

You search for viral tweets by combining a topic, an engagement floor, a repost filter and a date window. Listed below are the 5 steps.

1. Type the topic, in quotes if it is a phrase: "remote work".
2. Add a like floor: min_faves:5000.
3. Remove reposts so each post appears once: -filter:retweets.
4. Add a window for recent virality: since:2026-01-01.
5. Open Top, then lower or raise the floor by a factor of 10 until 20 to 100 posts remain.

The engagement operators are listed with the rest in the Twitter advanced search operators reference (twitter-advanced-search reference).

Viral Tweet Search Recipes

These viral tweet searches cover the research tasks people run most often. Replace the topic, handle and numbers.

Goal	Query
Viral posts on a topic this year	topic min_faves:1000 -filter:retweets since:2026-01-01
An account’s all-time hits	from:username min_faves:10000
Viral threads (long discussions)	topic min_replies:100 min_faves:500
Viral posts with video	topic filter:videos min_faves:1000
Viral posts with images	topic filter:images min_faves:1000
Most shared links on a topic	topic filter:links min_retweets:200
Viral posts in one language	topic min_faves:1000 lang:es
Viral posts in a niche’s list	list:LIST_ID min_faves:200

How Do You Find What Makes a Tweet Go Viral?

To find what makes tweets go viral in a topic, collect 50 to 100 of its top posts and compare their format, length, media and timing. Look for the patterns that repeat: a question or a claim in the first line, a list or thread format, an image or video, or a link. Filter by format to test each pattern: run the same query with filter:images, filter:videos and -filter:media, and compare how many posts clear the same like floor.

Why Do Viral Tweet Searches Return Few Results?

Viral tweet searches return few results when the threshold is too high for the topic or the date window is short. Lower min_faves: by a factor of 10, widen the window, and remove other filters one at a time. Widening means moving the dates, which since: and until: explained covers down to the hour.

How to Collect Viral Tweets With apidojo

X search shows viral posts but can’t export or rank them by exact counts, so apidojo’s Tweet Scraper V2 on Apify saves them with likes, reposts, replies, quotes and bookmarks for analysis. apidojo’s documented engagement example, in the Twitter Scraper Unlimited docs, uses a like and repost floor with sort: Top (Apify).

{
  "searchTerms": [
    "\"remote work\" min_faves:1000 -filter:retweets since:2026-01-01",
    "\"remote work\" filter:videos min_faves:1000 since:2026-01-01"
  ],
  "sort": "Top"
}

It costs $0.40 per 1,000 tweets. Turning a one-time viral search into an ongoing alert is covered in how to monitor a keyword on X with an API, and the full product is the apidojo Twitter Scraper.