Using X/Twitter with Buffer

With Buffer's publishing dashboard, you can craft, schedule, collaborate, and publish posts and X/Twitter Threads that drive meaningful engagement (and growth!) for your brand. From there, you can pop over to your analytics dashboard to analyze your key X/Twitter metrics, doubling-down on what works.

In this article:

These features are available for X/Twitter

Publishing Analytics Engagement
✓ ✓  

Connecting and refreshing your X/Twitter profile

Head to your Channels area to connect your X/Twitter account: https://account.buffer.com/channels

You can connect multiple X/Twitter accounts to Buffer. To make sure Buffer knows which one want to connect, log in to that X/Twitter account in another browser tab before trying to connect it to Buffer.

To see a step-by-step guide and troubleshooting steps for connecting X/Twitter, check out the article: Connect your channels to Buffer.

  • X/Twitter’s Delegate feature is not supported at this time. To connect your X/Twitter profile to Buffer, you’ll need to be logged into X.com/Twitter.com as the owner of the X/Twitter profile.
  • Connecting multiple X/Twitter accounts - Buffer will automatically try to connect to whichever account you're logged into in your browser, so we recommend logging into X.com/ Twitter.com with the account you want to connect to Buffer first and then heading to Buffer to connect the channel.

If your connected X/Twitter channel requires a refresh, check out the article Refreshing a channel in Buffer.

Scheduling posts, reposts, and threads

Check out the table below to see which features are available while scheduling posts for X/Twitter.

The "best time to post" feature in Analyze is not available for X/Twitter, but for advice on creating an optimal posting schedule, check out our blog post: The Best Time to Post on Twitter/X.

Features & good-to-knows Notes
Scheduling posts

Check out our step-by-step guide to scheduling posts on any social channel or peruse X/Twitter-specific details below.

📝 It’s only possible to schedule to one X/Twitter account at a time due to X's/Twitter’s guidelines. Duplicate posts (repeating the same content) are not allowed by X/Twitter.
Scheduling X/Twitter threads
  1. Click + Start Thread to add another post/tweet.

  2. Continue using the “+” button in the lower right-hand corner of your composer or press Enter three times to grow your thread.

    3. Once complete, schedule your thread or save it as a draft.

Good to knows:

  • You can include up to 25 threaded sub-posts within one post.
  • Creating X/Twitter threads is currently available only on the web (and not mobile) versions of Buffer. Mobile functions are limited to rescheduling or deleting threads that have been created on the web.
  • X/Twitter threads is available on our Free, Essentials, Team, and Agency plans. If you are a legacy customer on our Pro, Premium, or Business plans and would like to switch to our updated pricing, please email us at hello@buffer.com and we’ll be happy to help! Learn more about why X/Twitter threads isn't available on our legacy plans here.
  • The Free plan allows for one X/Twitter thread scheduled at a time in each queue. However, you can add as many threads to your Drafts queue as you like.
Scheduling reposts It is possible to schedule reposts to Buffer directly from your X/Twitter feed, as long as you have the Buffer browser extension installed (when on a web browser) or the Buffer mobile app (when on mobile). Learn more about Scheduling reposts on web and mobile here.
Tagging / Mentions To tag / mention another X/Twitter account, type in the exact handle. Once published to X/Twitter, the account you mentioned will become hyperlinked. X's/Twitter’s API no longer allows third-party tools to autocomplete handles. Learn more about Adding mentions (tags) in posts here.
Image descriptions / Alt text It is possible to add alt text to images scheduled to X/Twitter by clicking on your image and typing in the alt text. Learn more about Adding alt text to your images here.
Daily posting limit 100 posts per 24 hours. Learn more about Daily posting limits here.
Character limit

X Free users: 280 characters

X Basic, Premium and Premium + users: 25,000 characters*

*Extended character counts for paid X users are available on our Free, Essentials, Team, and Agency plans. If you are a legacy customer on our Pro, Premium, or Business plans and would like to switch to our updated pricing, please email us at hello@buffer.com and we’ll be happy to help!

📝 Only the first 280 characters of a post will be visible on the timeline, so if you're including a link in your post and want the preview to be visible, be sure to include the URLin the first 280 characters of the post.

Hashtags In the composer, type the hashtags you'd like to use. When the post is published, the hashtags will hyperlink just as if they were sent from the native platform itself. Learn more about How hashtags work in Buffer

At this time, we do not support the creation of X/Twitter polls through Buffer. If you'd like to see us support them in the future, you can upvote this suggestion on our feature request board.

Media specifications for X/Twitter

X/Twitter supports images, videos, and GIFs.

 

Videos

Images

GIFs
Number allowed per post

1

4

1
Video length

Minimum of .5 seconds and up to 140 seconds

📝 Longer videos for X Premium/Twitter Blue subscribers only apply to posts published natively on X/Twitter

-

-
File size

up to 512MB

up to 5MB

up to 15MB
Dimensions

8192 x 8192 pixels

1280 x 1080 pixels

Max total: 300 million px
File types supported

MP4, MOV, AVI, M4V

📝 Audio-only mp4 files cannot be shared to X/Twitter. The mp4 file must contain video.

JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP

GIF
Video autoplay in the feed

No

-

-
Custom thumbnail supported

No

-

-
Optimal number of frames

60 FPS or less

350

Note for GIFs:

If you see quality loss or errors when creating posts with animated GIFs, try these recommendations to improve success:

  • GIF Maximum resolution - 1280 x 1080 (width x height)
  • GIF Maximum number of frames - 350
  • GIF Maximum number of pixels (width * height * num_frames) - 300 million

Engagement on X/Twitter posts

At this time, Buffer's engagement features are only available for Facebook and Instagram. X/Twitter is not supported within Buffer's engagement features at this time.

X/Twitter analytics

X/Twitter analytics are available on our paid plans.

We can post all day, but the real excitement comes when seeing the reactions to our posts. If you’re on the Essentials, Team, or Agency plans, you’ll find all of your stats within two places: the Sent tab of our Publish dashboard offers basic post metrics while our Analytics dashboard offers advanced analytics.


Basic analytics

To get a quick view of each of your X/Twitter account's metrics, head to the Publish tab of the web dashboard and then click the Sent tab to access likes, clicks, reposts, and impressions.

X Sent Posts

Advanced Analytics

For a more in-depth look at how your X/Twitter posts are performing, head to the Analyze tab of the web dashboard. To dive straight in, learn about our X/Twitter metric descriptions, select X/Twitter on the left-hand side of your analytics dashboard, and peruse the tabs:

Buffer Analyze Overview screen with arrows pointing to Analyze and Twitter/X

📝 When you first connect an X/Twitter profile, we will be able to backfill up to 28 days of data. Learn more about Why your data in Buffer might differ from your native analytics here.

X/Twitter error library

If you're (unfortunately) hitting X/Twitter errors in Buffer, our X/Twitter error library is the place to go for solutions. If you are not finding the error listed, feel free to get in touch via hello@buffer.com and let us know -- we'll be happy to help!

📝Do you have an X/Twitter feature suggestion? We’d love for you to submit or upvote it here on our feature suggestions board.

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