Big companies have social teams and listening software. A three-person startup or a small agency has a founder with a phone and a support person who also does onboarding. The routine below is what we've seen work at that size. It takes about fifteen minutes, twice a day, and doesn't need anything beyond a free X account and a shared document.
Set up once
You need a few saved searches and one place to write things down.
Start with three saved searches on X, built with the query builder and saved from the Latest tab:
- Mentions: your brand name, handle and domain, with your own accounts excluded.
- Problems: your name plus words like broken, down, refund, cancel, or "not working".
- Opportunities: people in your category asking for recommendations, such as
"looking for" (tool OR app) (invoicing OR invoices) -filter:links.
Add a private list of 20 to 50 accounts worth watching: important customers, partners, competitors, and a few people who write about your field.
The shared document can be a spreadsheet with five columns: date, link to the post, type, what we did, and who did it. That's all. You'll use it for the weekly review.
Decide who checks, and when
Pick two fixed times a day, for example 9:30 and 16:00 in your main customers' time zone. One person owns each check. On a team of two or three, alternate by day or week so nobody becomes the permanent social person by accident.
Fixed times matter more than frequency. If everyone checks whenever they remember, posts fall through the gaps on busy days and get answered three times on quiet ones.
During a launch or an incident, add a quick look at the problems query every hour or so. Outside those periods, stick to the schedule.
The fifteen-minute check
Open the saved searches in order: problems first, then mentions, then the private list, then opportunities. Problems go first because those are the posts where a late reply costs the most.
For each post, make one of four calls.
Reply
You can help, answer a question, fix a misunderstanding, or thank someone for something specific. Reply from the brand account, in plain language, and link to a help page or the status page where useful.
Pass on
It needs someone else: a bug report for the developer, a sales question for whoever handles sales. Drop the link in your team chat with one line of context and the name of the person.
Log
No reply needed, but it's worth remembering: a feature request, praise, a competitor comparison, a recurring complaint. Add it to the sheet.
Skip
Spam, jokes that don't need you, and posts that just mention your name in passing.
Most posts are logs or skips. That's normal. On a typical day a small brand might reply to a handful of posts.
How to reply well
Answer the person, not the keyword. Read the whole thread before replying, check whether someone else on the team already answered, and keep it short. If the issue needs account details, move it to direct messages or email and say so publicly, so others who find the thread see it was handled.
Write each reply by hand. Copying the same text to many users in a short burst looks like spam to people and to X, and X's automation rules don't allow automated replies triggered by keyword searches. Templates in your notes are fine as a starting point; edit them for each person.
Don't argue. If someone is wrong about a fact, correct it once, politely, with a link. If they're just angry, acknowledge the problem and offer a way to fix it.
The weekly review
Once a week, spend twenty minutes with the sheet. Look for:
- Complaints that showed up more than twice. Those belong on the product or support backlog.
- Questions asked repeatedly. Those need a help article or an FAQ entry.
- Noise in the searches. If the same irrelevant posts keep appearing, add an exclusion to the query (a
-word, a-from:for a bot, or-filter:linksif news shares crowd it out) and save the improved version. - Gaps. If a customer emailed about something they also posted on X and you didn't see the post, find out why the query missed it.
Edit saved searches carefully. X saves the query text, so to change one you run the new version, save it, and delete the old one.
What to measure, if anything
Small teams don't need dashboards, but two numbers are worth tracking in the sheet: how many posts needed a reply each week, and how long after posting they got one. If the second number creeps up, the routine is slipping. If the first one jumps, something changed, maybe a release, a price change or an outage, and you'll want to know which.
When the routine stops fitting
Signs you've outgrown it: more than about thirty posts per check needing action, reply times longer than half a day, or a need for alerts outside working hours. At that point look at the paid options covered in keyword alerts on X, or give one person social as a real part of their job. Until then, fifteen minutes twice a day, a sheet, and three good searches cover most small teams.
MoniTwitter is independent and not affiliated with X Corp.
Questions
How often should a small team check X?
Twice a day on fixed schedule works for most small teams, with a quick extra look at an urgent query during launches or incidents. Checking constantly costs more focus than it saves.
Should we reply to every mention?
No. Reply when you can help, correct a factual error, or thank someone for something specific. Plenty of mentions just need to be read, counted or passed to the right person.