How to turn on post notifications on X (the bell)

#Quick answer

To turn on post notifications on X, open the profile of the account you want alerts from and tap the bell-shaped notification icon beside the Follow button. iPhone then asks you to pick All posts or Only posts with live video; Android asks you to check Account notifications first, then offers the same two modes. X documents the feature for accounts you already follow, and the alert is delivered as mobile push, not as a desktop notification.

Last updated: September 2026

#TL;DR

The bell on a profile is the most useful switch on X (formerly Twitter) and the worst documented. Most guides stop at "tap the bell," which leaves out the three things that actually decide whether you get the alert: the mode you pick, the master push toggle above it, and the fact that this is a phone feature wearing a web-app icon. This guide covers the exact steps on both apps, how to audit every account you have belled, whether the other person can tell, and what to use instead when you are trying to watch thirty accounts rather than one.

#How to turn on post notifications on X, step by step

Follow the account first. X describes the feature as post notifications from accounts you follow, so on an account you do not follow the bell either will not appear or will not stick.

On iPhone:

1. Open the account's profile.
2. Tap the bell (notification) icon in the row next to the Follow button.
3. Choose All posts or Only posts with live video.
4. Tap your selection. The bell fills in to show it is active.

On Android:

1. Open the account's profile and tap the bell icon.
2. Check the box next to Account notifications.
3. From the pop-up, choose All posts or Only live video.
4. Tap your selection.

Android has one quirk X mentions on its own help page: the app can take a few minutes to reflect a notification change. If you tested it against an account that posts constantly and got nothing for ninety seconds, wait before you start reinstalling things.

#The two modes matter more than the bell

Everyone taps the bell. Almost nobody thinks about which mode they picked, and that single choice is the difference between a useful signal and a phone you mute by Thursday.

A rough rule from watching people do this badly: if an account posts more than five or six times a day, All posts will train you to swipe notifications away without reading them, which costs you the alerts you actually wanted. Live video only, or a List, is the better shape for those.

#Where the bell quietly does not work: desktop

Here is the gap almost every ranking guide on this query glosses over. The bell renders on profiles in the web app, so it looks like a desktop feature. It is not documented as one.

X publishes the notification types for web and browser notifications, and the list is Direct Messages, follows, likes, replies to your posts, mentions and reposts of your posts. Posts from a specific account do not appear on it. The per-account bell is documented on a different page entirely, the one titled around push notifications delivered through the X app, and every step there is written for a phone.

So the practical read: set the bell wherever you like, but expect the alert on your phone. If you sit at a desk and want a live view of specific accounts on that screen, you want a column or a feed, not a notification. Two options:

• A pinned List. Free, unlimited accounts, no alerts, and it shows up as a swipeable tab at the top of your home timeline. See how to use Lists on X for building and pinning one.
• X Pro columns. The old TweetDeck layout, now behind a paid tier. Our breakdown of whether TweetDeck is still free has the current access story, and X Premium pricing has what the tier costs.

#Can the other person tell?

No alert fires. X publishes no notification type for "someone turned on your post notifications," there is no badge on your profile, and nothing in the other account's settings lists who has belled them.

One honest caveat: this is an absence of a feature rather than a privacy promise. X has never documented it as protected, and it could surface the count in a future analytics panel the way it surfaced bookmark counts. What is true today: the account you belled has no way to see it, and neither do your followers.

#Audit every account you have belled

This is the settings screen nobody finds, and it is the fix for a phone that has slowly become unusable. X's help page documents it directly:

1. Tap your profile icon in the top menu.
2. Select Settings and privacy.
3. Tap Notifications, then Preferences.
4. Tap Push notifications.
5. Tap Posts.

That screen is both the master switch for post notifications and the place to see which accounts you enabled them for. Two things follow from that structure. The master Posts toggle sits above every individual bell, so if it is off, no per-account alert delivers regardless of how many bells you have filled in. And the per-account switch-off lives on the profile, not here: tap the highlighted bell and pick None.

If you are auditing because notifications got loud, how to turn off notifications on X walks through all four of X's separate notification systems, which is the part that makes people think one switch is broken when really a different system is still on.

#Post notifications not arriving? Work outward

Debug in this order, because each layer overrides the one below it.

1. Your phone's OS permission for the X app. It survives in-app settings and it is the single most common cause. iOS and Android both let you revoke notifications for an app without the app knowing.
2. Push notifications, Posts, in X's Preferences. The master toggle described above.
3. The bell on that specific profile. Unfollowing and refollowing an account resets it to None, which catches people who cleaned up their following list.
4. Device count. X's help page states that once 25 devices are attached to your account you cannot create new push destinations, and the fix is revoking the app under Settings, Apps, then reinstalling and signing back in.
5. Device type. X says notifications are not push compatible on tablets, including Android tablets with the app installed.
6. Platform side. Notification delivery on X has had visible wobbles through 2026. Before changing settings, check whether a second account of yours is also missing alerts. If both are quiet, it is not your settings.

Worth knowing what is not the cause: X states its notifications quality filter does not filter notifications from people you follow or accounts you recently interacted with. Since the bell only applies to accounts you follow, the filter is not what is eating those alerts.

#When notifications are the wrong tool entirely

Most people who search for this are not trying to follow one person more closely. They are trying to be first in the replies on accounts that matter in their niche, because early replies on a big post are still one of the cheapest ways to get seen on X.

The bell is a bad instrument for that job. It scales to about three accounts before it becomes noise, it gives you no context about the post, and it makes your reply speed a function of whether you happened to be holding your phone. Watching fifteen accounts through push notifications is not a strategy, it is a nervous habit.

Better shapes for that goal:

• A List of the fifteen accounts, pinned to your home tabs, checked deliberately twice a day rather than reactively all day.
• The bell on two or three accounts only, set to All posts, where being early genuinely pays.
• Mute the accounts you follow out of obligation rather than belling the ones you care about. Muting raises the signal in the feed you already read.

If the underlying problem is that showing up consistently takes more attention than you have, that is a systems problem rather than a notifications problem. X-Autopilot drafts your posts and replies from a real Chrome browser on your own Mac, so the session cookie stays on your machine and there is no delegate account or shared cloud IP pool: a lower detection surface than cloud schedulers, though browser-route automation on X remains a gray area rather than a sanctioned path. It will not tap the bell for you. What it removes is the reason you wanted a phone alert at 11pm in the first place.

Set the bell on the two accounts that deserve it, put the rest in a List, and get your evenings back.