How to share tweets to Instagram Stories

Learn how to directly share tweets on Instagram as story stickers using Twitter’s official mobile app for iPhone and iPad, with Android support eventually launching in the future.

Promotional graphics highlighting the Share menu in the mobile Twitter app for iPhone
Image credit: Twitter

What you need to know

On June 22, 2011, Twitter started testing the ability to share tweets on Instagram Stories.

According to the announcement post on Twitter, the addition of the native sharing options means people will no longer have to resort to tricks like taking a screenshot of a tweet in the mobile Twitter app for iPhone and iPad and sharing it as an image in a story on Instagram.

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This capability was in limited testing at the time of this writing, meaning it could change down the road, get pulled or you may not see it at all in your Twitter app.

“We know people share tweets to their communities on other social media apps, and we’ve made it easier for people to share tweets on Instagram Stories,” reads the Twitter website.

The feature is limited to public tweets. To be clear, a tweet originating from a private account cannot be shared on Instagram using this new native sharing option in Twitter for iOS.

How to share a tweet to an Instagram story

To share a single tweet as a sticker in your Instagram story, select the Share icon on a tweet and choose the “Instagram Stories” icon from the menu.

  1. Open the Twitter app on your iPhone.
  2. Touch the Share icon on any public tweet.
  3. Choose “Instagram Stories” from the Share menu.
  4. Once the Instagram app opens, resize or reposition the tweet sticker before posting.

The tweet automatically appears as a sticker in a new story draft that opens on Instagram.

Promotional graphics highlighting the Share icon in the mobile Twitter app for iPhone
Image credit: Twitter

Don’t forget you can pinch on the sticker to resize it. You can also rotate and move the sticker anywhere you like. When satisfied, choose whether you’d like to share this story with a single person, your Closed Friends list or all of your followers like you normally would.

Wrapping it all up

This is a much better, faster way of sharing a tweet on Instagram than having to screenshot it.

Instead of appearing as a bitmap image, the tweet shows up as a sticker which makes it look crisper when enlarged. And because it’s interactive, the tweet sticker comes complete with the original author’s Twitter handle, as well as the number of likes and comments.