X FAQs

Topics covered in this article:

• X reach vs. X impressions
• Preventing messages from appearing in your Smart Inbox
• Not seeing X Comparison Report
• Data not appearing for X Profile in Sprout
• X Verification

What's the difference between Sprout Social's X reach and X's impressions?

If you use Sprout's Post Performance reporting, you may notice that Sprout's Reach statistic is normally much higher than X's "Impressions" number. This is due to how the Sprout platform gathers and calculates Post performance.

Sprout calculates a Post's reach by the number of followers you have when you post the message, plus the number of followers of each person who retweets your Post. Because it's likely that your Post won't be seen by all of those people, this is considered the potential maximum reach.

X, on the other hand, knows exactly when a Post was seen in a user's timeline, so they can give a more accurate Impressions number. However, they can only determine if a Post was viewed when it's served by an official X platform (their website and official mobile apps, for example). So their number can be considered the very minimum number of times it was seen.

Using both the Post Performance Report in Sprout and X's own analytics together can give you a good idea of how many times your Post was seen. 

Can I prevent messages from certain X users from showing in my inbox?

Yes, by leveraging Brand Keywords.  You can learn more about Brand Keywords by reading this helpful article.

Include search operators in your Brand Keywords to help filter out irrelevant messages and zero in on the keyword matches that are important to your business. To make sure you don't see messages from a specific X user, you can use the - operator to remove any of their results from your keyword results. For example:

Sprout -from:SproutGKeenan

This brand keyword/search operator string example would pull in messages from X that contain the word Sprout, as long as they weren't from the handle @SproutGKeenan:

Why isn't my X Comparison Report showing?

Comparison reports can sometimes take up to 24 hours for Sprout to access that competitor or handle data from X.

If you still don't see data after 24 hours, let us know by contacting Sprout Support, and we can look into this further.

Why can't I see data for my X (formerly Twitter) profile?

Sprout integrates with X (formerly Twitter) via an API, to pass data between the two platforms. Based on how X has built their API, there are a few important things to note regarding how Sprout can receive this data: 

• Audience Metrics: Audience metrics (like follower count) cannot be backfilled for X profiles; you will only see data from the date of profile connection onward.
• Recent Profile Connection: After connecting a new X (formerly Twitter) profile, it can take up to 24 hours to see profile data for the past 30 days, as data is processed daily for newly connected profiles.
• Backfill Limits on Posts and Metrics: Only up to 1 year of published posts and metrics are backfilled; older data will not be available.
• Paid Posts Exclusion: “Paid posts” are generally not received, although interactions with those posts may be. This can cause gaps in post data.
• API Rate Limits: There are limits on how much data can be pulled at once, so high-volume profiles may not see all historical data at once.
• Competitor Audience Metrics: While these cannot be backfilled for X competitor profiles (only show from the date of adding the competitor onward), some details may appear if that competitor profile already has collected history.
• Competitor Engagement Metrics: The X (formerly Twitter) API can backfill up to last 30 days of posts and associated metrics from the date the competitor was added.

X Verification

Sprout is not able to verify X profiles. You will have to get in touch with X's Support team for this. You can visit this link for more information.