Free Twitter analytics: what still works on X

Free Twitter analytics still exist on X, but only at the post level. Every account can see impressions, engagements, profile visits and link clicks for each post inside the X app, while the account-wide dashboard sits behind a paid subscription. ProfileTree builds free X measurement routines on that split for businesses across Northern Ireland, Ireland and Great Britain.

What X still shows for free

Post-level data is the part of X analytics that stayed free, and for most small businesses it is enough to make sound decisions. Account-level reporting, the historical view across every post you have published, is the part that costs money, and that split decides whether you need to pay for anything at all.

Per-post analytics in the X app

Open the app, find a post you published, and tap the small bar chart icon beneath it. You will see the four post figures listed above, including impressions (the number of times the post appeared on someone’s screen), on any account and at no cost. It is slower than a dashboard when you want a month at a glance, though the numbers come straight from X.

This is also the honest answer to the common search for a free impressions checker. No separate tool reads impressions reliably, because X does not pass that figure to most third-party software, so the app itself is where the number lives.

Your X data archive

You can request an archive of your account from the settings menu, and X sends a downloadable file of your posts, followers and account records. It is useful for record-keeping, though it will not give you a clean impressions report, so treat it as a backup and keep the app for performance figures.

What the paid X tiers add

Since 12 October 2026, new buyers pay for X features through The X Subscription. It runs from a free tier through Plus at $8 a month and Premium at $30 a month to two higher tiers at $100 and $200. The Premium tier carries what used to be the Premium+ benefits, and existing X Premium subscribers keep their current plans. These are US list prices, and UK pricing varies.

X’s published tier descriptions do not say which new tier includes the account analytics dashboard. Check the plan details in your own subscription settings before upgrading for that reason alone. ProfileTree is a Belfast web design and digital marketing agency, founded in 2011 and based at the McSweeney Centre, and our social media marketing services usually start from this free routine before any tool is bought.

How X’s API and subscription changes removed the free tools

Reading X data now costs money, so free tools have moved towards publishing posts, where the cost to the provider is far lower. Several rounds of change produced that position, and most published guides were written before at least one of them.

The 2023 API restrictions

An API (application programming interface) is the route third-party software uses to read data from a platform such as X. 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 within months. Social Bearing, once among the most recommended free tools, announced in the spring that its free access had been revoked and that the service could not continue.

Pay-per-use billing since February 2026

In February 2026, X replaced its self-serve API tiers with pay-per-use billing. Under X’s developer pricing, developers buy credits in advance, and no free tier is listed. They pay $0.001 for each item read from their own account and $0.005 for each item read from someone else’s. A tool that shows you your X numbers pays X for every read it makes on your behalf, which is why so few of them do it for nothing.

X Pro and The X Subscription

X Pro, the multi-column monitoring tool that used to be TweetDeck, was free until August 2023 and then moved behind X Premium. On 26 March 2026, it moved again to Premium+, which Engadget reported at $40 a month in the US, and existing Premium subscribers lost access mid-cycle without notice. Since the October launch, new buyers find those Premium+ benefits in the $30 Premium tier, and our X Pro guide sets out who it still suits.

Twitter analytics tools that cost nothing on X

Only a handful of free plans still connect to an X account, and most of them schedule posts without reporting on them. The table shows what each one does on X, based on each provider’s own pricing pages and help documentation.

Buffer’s own help centre states that X analytics are a paid feature. It also notes that X does not report impressions through its API, so Buffer’s visibility chart is unavailable for X on any plan. SocialDog suits a business that wants to watch whether its follower count is moving while keeping a small queue of posts running.

Tweet Binder, now part of Audiense, gives one report covering a hashtag, keyword or account. That suits a small launch, an event hashtag or a week of brand mentions, though nowhere near enough for a long campaign. Twitonomy still runs with reduced features, and a free account lets you read posting habits, mentions and follower lists on screen without downloading them.

Metricool is often listed as a free X analytics option and is not one. Its help centre puts the X add-on at €10 or $10 a month for each connected account, on top of a Metricool subscription. Accounts that added it before July 2026 keep the older €5 rate.

Tools that closed or moved

Social Bearing has closed, and MentionMapp’s network visualisation tool no longer loads at its former address. Followerwonk was acquired by Fedica, and its follower search and comparison features now run inside the Fedica dashboard, with the demographic and location breakdowns on a paid tier. Any guide still recommending these, or a free TweetDeck, was not checked before publication, and a workflow built around them needs rebuilding.

How to get Twitter analytics without a subscription

The manual route works on every account, costs nothing, and takes under an hour a month once the habit is set. It also tells you exactly how each figure was produced, which a third-party dashboard does not always make clear.

Working out engagement rate yourself

Take a sample of recent posts, add up the engagements shown in the app and divide by the impressions for the same posts, then multiply by 100. That is the calculation X’s own dashboard runs. Published benchmarks vary widely because some divide engagements by impressions and others divide by follower count, so write down the formula you chose and keep using it.

The same approach works on other networks, and our guide to free analytics on other social platforms covers the equivalent routes on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Keeping one formula across every platform makes a cross-channel report far easier to read.

Benchmarking a competitor’s X account

Competitor tracking on X needs no login and no paid listening platform. Take ten recent posts from the account, add up the visible likes, reposts, and replies, divide by the account’s follower count, and multiply by 100. That gives a rough engagement rate you can set beside your own, provided you calculate yours on the same basis.

This method will not show impressions or link clicks, which stay private to the account owner. It is enough to judge whether a rival’s following is engaged or inflated by follow-unfollow tactics, using only what the account chose to make public. Where a comparison like this feeds into a wider positioning decision, it belongs inside a digital strategy review.

The X metrics that matter to a business

The metrics worth acting on depend on what you use X for, and a Belfast accountancy practice will not track the same figures as a London e-commerce brand. A few principles hold across both.

Comparing impressions by post type (text, image, video, or poll) is the fastest way to find the format worth repeating. Video tends to look weaker on a single-platform report than it is, because a clip usually earns most of its reach once it is reused on other channels.

Numbers that are safe to ignore

A large follower count with low engagement often points to dormant accounts or follow-unfollow tactics, and a smaller audience in the right sector produces more business. Impressions on their own show that a post appeared on a screen, with no sign that anyone read it or acted on it.

Likes take the least effort of any interaction and carry the least commercial signal, so an account earning steady replies at lower volume is doing better in every sense that matters. A viral post that travels outside your target audience can distort a month’s figures without producing a single enquiry, so look at who engaged as well as how many.

Connecting X activity to enquiries

What posting is worth to a business shows up in link clicks and in what visitors do afterwards. Closing the gap between a repost and a sale takes a few habits and no paid tool.

Tag every link you post with UTM parameters, short pieces of text added to the end of a URL that tell Google Analytics 4 (GA4) where a visitor came from. A link posted on X should look like this: https://yourdomain.co.uk/services/?utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=spring-guide. Keep the naming consistent across every post, because inconsistent tags split one source into several and make the report harder to read.

Engagement and traffic do not always move together, and a post with forty likes and no clicks is entertaining an audience without building a pipeline. Over three or four weeks, compare engagement rate against click rate by content type, then put your effort behind the posts that send people to the site. GA4 then shows whether visitors from X leave at once, browse, or make an enquiry, and a page that converts social visitors badly usually needs a landing page fix.

“ProfileTree does not sell paid advertising, and that is deliberate. When we set up social media marketing for a business in Northern Ireland, the measurement has to keep working after the invoice is paid, so we build it on the free figures X still gives every account, and on the clicks the business can see in its own analytics,” says Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree.

A monthly review does not need to be elaborate. Five steps cover it, and the whole loop takes under an hour:

1. Pull your top ten posts by link clicks and look for a shared format or topic.
2. Check whether follower growth this month was steady, flat or falling after a specific event.
3. Open GA4 and see whether visitors from X stayed on the site or left at once.
4. Look at your top mentions and decide whether the accounts sharing your posts are the ones you want.
5. Name one thing that worked and one that did not, and choose one change to test next month.

Teams that report across several networks can fold this review into a single monthly summary. Our guide to social media reporting for SMEs shows how that summary is put together.

UK GDPR and exporting X data

Exporting follower lists or collecting public handles into a marketing database brings UK GDPR (the UK General Data Protection Regulation) into play as soon as identifiable people are involved. Most guidance on Twitter analytics leaves this out, and it matters for any UK or Irish business building a prospect list from public profiles.

On 24 August 2023, the Information Commissioner’s Office and eleven other data protection authorities published a joint statement on data scraping. It sets out that personal information which is publicly available is still protected by data protection law, and that an organisation needs a lawful reason to collect and use it.

Before you export a follower list or a competitor’s audience data, write down why you need it and how long you will keep it, and check that you can delete a person’s record if they ask. If any of that has no answer yet, do not export. Legitimate interests will usually cover straightforward benchmarking, provided you have thought the purpose through and recorded it.

Setting up a free X measurement routine

Free routes cover most of what a small or medium business needs from X. Paid tools earn their cost when you manage several accounts that need one combined report, or when you send automated reports to people who will never log in to a dashboard. Before paying X directly, compare the subscription with a cross-platform tool, because if X is one channel among several, one tool covering all of them usually gives more for similar money.

Start with the app for post data this week, and add one free third-party plan if you want a cleaner view, chosen for what it delivers on X today. Tag every link you post and run the monthly review. Teams that want staff able to run this routine without one person holding all the knowledge can build it into a digital training session based on their own accounts.

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