Free Twitter Analytics: What Still Works, What Died

Yes, you can still get Twitter (X) analytics for free, but the list of tools that actually work has shrunk dramatically. Most guides to free Twitter analytics still recommend products that stopped functioning years ago. The honest position in 2026: per-post data remains free in the X mobile app, a small number of third-party free tiers still connect to X, and several once-standard tools are either closed, paywalled, or no longer at the address people remember.

This guide covers which tools survived the API changes, which ones died, what X now charges for, and how to connect X activity to business results without paying for a subscription.

Is Twitter (X) Analytics Free Now?

Partly. Account-level analytics moved behind X Premium, while post-level data stayed free. That split is the single most important thing to understand before choosing a tool, because it determines whether you need a subscription at all.

For most small and medium businesses in the UK, the free mobile route plus one free third-party tier covers what you need. The gap that money closes is historical depth and audience demographics, not basic measurement.

What the X API Changes Killed

This is where most published advice on free Twitter analytics goes wrong. When X restricted its free API tier in early 2023 and repriced the paid tiers, a large part of the third-party analytics market closed overnight. Tool lists written before that point, and plenty written after, still name products that no longer exist.

Here is the verified status of the tools most commonly recommended, checked in August 2026.

Two of these deserve emphasis because they contradict what nearly every listicle still says.

TweetDeck is not free. It was one of the best free monitoring tools available for over a decade, and a lot of businesses still plan around that. As of 26 March 2026 it sits behind X Premium+, reported by Engadget and MacRumors at $40 a month or $395 a year, having previously been available on the cheaper $8 Premium tier. Existing subscribers lost access mid-billing cycle without warning. If your social workflow assumes TweetDeck, it needs rebuilding.

Social Bearing and MentionMapp are gone. Social Bearing shut down in April 2023 when its free API access was withdrawn. MentionMapp’s network visualisation tool is no longer available at its former address. Any guide still recommending either was not checked before publication.

How to Check X/Twitter Analytics Without Premium

Three routes remain, in order of how much they cost.

Option A: Per-post mobile analytics (free)

Open the X app, find a post you have published, and tap the small bar chart icon beneath it. This shows impressions, engagements, profile visits and link clicks for that post at no cost. It is slower than a dashboard when you want to review a full month, but it is the most direct free route to real numbers, and it works on every account.

This is also the answer to the common question of how to check impressions without paying. There is no separate free impressions checker that works reliably; the app itself is the tool.

Option B: Free third-party tiers that still connect to X

Only a handful of free plans still support X, and each one has a real limit worth knowing before you sign up.

Buffer’s free plan connects three channels and holds ten queued posts per channel, with each slot freeing up once a post publishes. There is a condition on the analytics that catches people out, and it sits in Buffer’s own channel support table. A free X profile does not get Buffer’s basic analytics; it gets the advanced analytics, and advanced analytics is a paid-tier feature. An X profile with Premium does get the basic analytics, which on the free plan holds 30 days of history. Read Buffer as a good free scheduler for X either way, and as free X reporting only if the account already has Premium.

Fedica’s free plan is a scheduler rather than an analytics tool, and getting that distinction right saves a wasted signup. It connects one account per platform and holds up to ten scheduled posts at a time, with no cap on how many you publish in a month. The engagement dashboard and the rest of the analytics start on the paid Publish plan at $10 a month billed annually. Fedica is the current home of the Followerwonk tools, so if you previously used Followerwonk for follower search or account comparison, this is where those features went. The follower demographics and geographic breakdown that made Followerwonk useful sit on the Grow tier at $19 a month billed annually.

Twitonomy’s free tier still runs, with one caveat that most guides get wrong. The one-click Excel export and the automated Followers Report are paid features, not free ones. What a free account gives you is manual profile-level analysis: posting habits, mentions, hashtags and follower lists you can read on screen but cannot download. That suits a quick read on a single account before a pitch or a partnership. For anything that needs to land in a spreadsheet, budget for the paid tier. The tweet-level analysis Twitonomy was originally known for was reduced when the API changed.

A note on what is not free: Metricool is frequently listed as a free X analytics option and is not. Its own documentation confirms the free plan excludes X entirely, and paid plans require a per-account add-on on top of the subscription price. Metricool’s own pricing page puts that add-on at €5 per connected Premium account, so an active X Premium subscription forms part of the real cost.

Option C: Calculate it yourself

For engagement rate, you do not need a tool at all. Take a sample of recent posts, add up the engagements, and divide by impressions from the mobile app. This is the same calculation the native dashboard performs, and doing it manually costs nothing and gives you a number you understand the derivation of.

ProfileTree’s social media marketing team builds this kind of lightweight measurement routine for clients who would rather not add another subscription. For a wider view across platforms, the guide to free social media analytics tools covers the equivalent options on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Core X/Twitter Metrics Explained in Plain English

The metrics worth acting on depend on what you use X for. A Belfast accountancy practice and a London e-commerce brand have different priorities, but a few principles hold across most business contexts.

One caution on engagement rate benchmarks: published figures vary widely because different sources use different denominators. X’s own dashboard divides engagements by impressions. Several industry benchmark reports divide interactions by follower count instead. Those produce very different numbers, so check which formula a benchmark used before comparing yourself against it.

“The businesses that get value out of social measurement are the ones that pick two or three metrics tied to something commercial and then stop looking at the rest. Link clicks, and what happens after the click, will tell you more about whether X is worth your time than any follower number, and both are free to track,” says Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree.

Comparing impressions by post type (text, video, image, poll) is the fastest way to decide which format is worth repeating. Video posts tend to under-report their true value on a single-platform dashboard, since a clip’s reach usually extends well beyond X once it is repurposed. ProfileTree’s video production work is generally planned across channels for that reason.

How to Audit a Competitor’s X/Twitter Analytics

Most guides to competitor tracking either claim it cannot be done without a login or push an enterprise listening platform. Neither is accurate. Any public account can be benchmarked using data that is already visible.

The formula: take a sample of ten recent posts from the account, add up the total engagements (likes, reposts, replies), divide by the account’s follower count, then multiply by 100. That gives a rough engagement rate you can compare against your own.

This will not give you impressions or click data, which stay private. It is enough to judge whether a competitor’s following is genuinely engaged or inflated by follow-unfollow tactics, and it uses only information the account owner has chosen to make public.

If competitor benchmarking forms part of a wider positioning exercise, it is worth pairing with a broader digital strategy review rather than treating social metrics in isolation.

Connecting X/Twitter Performance to Business Outcomes

The question most businesses struggle to answer is what their social activity is actually worth. The gap between a repost and a sale is real, but it can be closed.

Set up UTM parameters for every link you post

UTM parameters are small pieces of code added to the end of a URL that tell Google Analytics where traffic came from. A link posted on X should look like this:

Track which content types drive traffic, not just engagement

Engagement and traffic do not always correlate. A post that gets 40 likes and zero link clicks is entertaining your audience, not driving business. Over three to four weeks, compare engagement rate against link click rate by content type, and put more resources behind whatever actually moves people to the site.

Review conversion data in Google Analytics

Once UTM tracking is in place, look at what X visitors do after they land. Do they bounce, visit multiple pages, or complete a contact form? This is where search engine optimisation and social work overlap: a page that ranks well but does not convert social traffic usually has a landing page problem rather than a channel problem, and that is often a website design fix rather than a social media one.

Avoiding the Vanity Metric Trap

A few metrics cause more confusion than they are worth.

Total follower count: a large following with low engagement often points to mass follow-unfollow tactics or inactive accounts. A smaller, engaged audience in the right sector generates more business value.

Total impressions without context: impressions measure how many times a post appeared on a screen, not whether anyone read or acted on it. They also include your own view of your own posts.

Likes: likes require the least effort from a viewer and carry the least commercial signal. An account generating consistent replies and link clicks at a lower volume is performing better in any business sense.

Viral moments: a post that travels outside your target audience can distort a month’s figures without generating any business value. Look at who engaged, not just how many.

A Simple Monthly Measurement Routine

Analytics only creates value if you act on what you find. A monthly review does not need to be complicated:

1. Pull your top ten posts by link clicks, not likes or impressions, and look for a common format or topic.
2. Check follower growth rate month on month. Steady, flat, or declining after a specific event?
3. Review website traffic from X in Google Analytics. Are visitors staying or bouncing?
4. Look at your top mentions. Are the accounts amplifying you in your target audience?
5. Compare this month to last. Identify one thing that worked, one that did not, and one change to test next month.

That five-step loop takes under an hour. Teams that want it built into a wider reporting cadence, or want staff trained to run it independently, often add it to a digital training session so the routine does not depend on one person remembering.

UK GDPR Considerations for X/Twitter Data

If you are exporting follower lists, collecting public handles into a marketing database, or pulling audience data through a third-party tool, that activity falls under UK GDPR the moment it involves identifiable individuals. This is a gap in most Twitter analytics guidance, and it matters for any UK or Irish business building a prospect list from public profiles.

The Information Commissioner’s Office is explicit that publicly visible does not mean freely usable: people retain a reasonable expectation about how their data is processed, even when they posted it themselves. Before exporting a follower list or a competitor’s audience data, check that you have a lawful basis (usually legitimate interests for straightforward benchmarking), that you are not retaining more than you need, and that anyone appearing in a report can be handled under a subject access request.

A practical three-step check before exporting anything: confirm why you need the data, confirm how long you will keep it, and confirm you can delete it on request. If any of those three have no answer, do not export yet.

When Paid Analytics Tools Start to Make Sense

Free routes cover most of what small and medium businesses need. Paid platforms earn their cost in specific situations: managing several accounts and needing unified reporting, benchmarking against named competitors at scale, running paid campaigns on X and needing granular attribution, or sharing automated reports with stakeholders who will not log into a dashboard.

There is also a straightforward calculation to run before subscribing. X Premium unlocks the native dashboard, and the tool market has consolidated enough that a single third-party subscription often covers more ground than Premium alone. If X is one channel among several, a cross-platform tool usually gives better value than paying X directly for a 28-day view of one platform.

Where to Start This Week

If you take one thing from this guide, make it this: check whether the tools in your current workflow still exist before you plan around them. A surprising number of businesses are working from a documented process that names two or three products that closed in 2023.

Start with the mobile app for post data, add one free third-party tier if you need a cleaner reporting view, set up UTM parameters on every link you post, and run the five-step monthly review. That covers measurement for most SMEs without a subscription. Add paid tools when the reporting burden, not the data gap, becomes the constraint.

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