Using Twitter with Buffer

Mel

September 05, 2023 07:52

While Twitter (or X.com) has gone through quite a few changes over the years, it continues to be a fairly strong channel for e-commerce and small businesses.

Through your publishing dashboard in Buffer, you can craft, schedule, collaborate and publish Tweets and 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 Twitter metrics, doubling-down on what works.

Let's get into the details.

This article contains the following sections:

Connecting your Twitter profile
Scheduling Tweets, Retweets, and threads
Media specifications for Twitter
Engagement on Twitter posts
Twitter analytics
Twitter error library

These features are available for Twitter

Publishing	Analytics	Engagement
✓	✓

Connecting your Twitter profile

You can connect multiple Twitter profiles to Buffer. To see a step-by-step guide and troubleshooting steps, check out the article: Connect your channels to Buffer.

Scheduling Tweets, Retweets, and threads

You have content to share, and luckily, Twitter has several different features to offer you. We’ll explain each of the Buffer-friendly Twitter features below.

Features & good-to-knows	Notes
Scheduling Tweets	Check out our step-by-step guide to scheduling posts on any social channel or peruse Twitter-specific details below. 📝 It’s only possible to schedule to one Twitter account at a time due to Twitter’s guidelines. Duplicate Tweets (repeating the same content) are not allowed by Twitter.
Scheduling Twitter threads	Click + Start Thread to add another Tweet. Continue using the “+” button in the lower right-hand corner of your composer to grow your thread. Once complete, schedule your thread or save it as a draft. 📝 Good to knows: Creating 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. 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 new pricing, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help! Learn more about why Twitter threads isn't available on our legacy plans here. The Free plan allows for one Twitter thread scheduled at a time in each queue. However, you can add as many threads to your Drafts queue as you like.
Scheduling Retweets	It is possible to schedule Retweets to Buffer directly from your 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 Retweets on web and mobile here.
Tagging / Mentions	To tag / mention another Twitter account, type in the exact handle. Once published to Twitter, the account you mentioned will become hyperlinked. Twitter’s API no longer allows third-party tools to autocomplete handles.
Image descriptions / Alt text	It is possible to add alt text to images scheduled to 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	280 characters per Tweet. 📝 Due to API limitations, the increased character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers only applies to Tweets published natively on Twitter. Learn more about Character limits for each social network here.

Media specifications for Twitter

Twitter supports images, videos, and GIFs.

	Videos	Images	GIFs
Number allowed per Tweet	1	4	1
Video length	up to 140 seconds 📝 Longer videos for Twitter Blue subscribers only apply to Tweets published natively on Twitter	-	-
File size	up to 512MB	up to 5MB	up to 3MB
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 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 Tweets 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 Twitter posts

Buffer's engagement features are only available for Facebook and Instagram.

Twitter analytics

We can tweet all day, but the real excitement comes when seeing the reactions to our Tweets. If you’re on the Essentials, Team, or Agency plans, you’ll find all of your stats within the Analytics tab.

To dive straight in, learn about our Twitter metric descriptions, select Twitter on the left-hand side of your analytics dashboard, and peruse the tabs:

Overview: gives insight into your overall engagement levels for your profile over time. Learn more about the Performance overview on your analytics dashboard.
Posts: provides a history of all of your published posts and how they are performing. Learn more about Analyzing your posts within your analytics dashboard.
Answers: shares answers to questions such as the best day, type, and frequency to post. Learn more about Answering questions about your social media strategy.

📝 When you first connect a 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

Twitter error library

If you're [unfortunately] hitting Twitter errors in Buffer, our Twitter error library is the place to go for solutions. If you are not finding the error listed, feel free to get in touch and let us know -- we'll be happy to help!

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

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