Build an X Monitoring Board Without Paid Tools

TweetDeck used to be the free way to watch several searches at once. It became X Pro, and as of 2026 X Pro needs a Premium+ subscription. Paid listening tools cost far more than that. If you only need to keep an eye on a brand, a beat or a job market, you can get most of the way there with ordinary X searches arranged as a board, and a habit of reading them.

This guide walks through how we plan a board in the Power Search planner. The same thinking works if you keep your searches as browser bookmarks or as saved searches inside X.

Start with questions, not keywords

The most common mistake is one giant column: your brand name, a couple of hashtags and a competitor, all joined with OR. It returns everything, which is the same as returning nothing useful, because you can't tell at a glance what needs a reply.

Write down the questions you want X to answer instead. For a small software company that list might be:

Who is asking how to do something with our product?
Who is reporting that it broke?
Who is comparing us with a competitor?
Which posts about us are spreading right now?

Each question becomes a column. The keyword stays the same across columns, and the extra words and operators are what make each one answer a different question. A "Problems" column adds words like "not working", broken or bug. A "Comparisons" column adds vs, "switched to" and "alternative to".

Write one search per column

A good column query has three parts: the subject, the narrowing, and the cleanup.

The subject is what you're tracking. If it's one word that people only use for you, write it as is. If it's a common word, put it in quotes with something that pins it down: "notion" (app OR workspace) works better than notion alone. Group alternatives in brackets with an uppercase OR: (acme OR @acme OR acme.com).

The narrowing is what makes the column answer its question. That might be a list of words in brackets, an engagement threshold such as min_faves:100, or a content filter such as filter:links or filter:media.

The cleanup removes what you never want to read. -filter:replies hides replies, which makes Latest columns much easier to scan. -from:yourhandle hides your own posts. -giveaway or -"follow back" removes common spam patterns in many niches.

The operator cheatsheet lists every operator we use, with the quirks that break searches.

Pick the tab for each column

Every X search opens on one of several tabs, and the choice changes what you see.

Latest sorts strictly by time. It's the right tab for anything you need to catch as it happens, such as complaints, questions or first reports. In the planner, a Latest column adds f=live to the link.

Top is X's ranked view. It mixes in older posts with more engagement, so it's better for "what are people seeing about this" than for catching new posts. Use it for columns with a high min_faves threshold.

Media shows only posts with images or video, laid out as a grid. It's the right home for photo and clip columns.

Lay out the board

Order matters more than you'd expect. Put the columns that need action on the left, because those are the ones you read first and the ones you'll still read on a busy day. Questions and complaints go before praise. A Top column showing what's spreading goes near the end.

Colour helps too. We keep the same colour for the same kind of column across boards: rose for problems, teal for questions, amber for media. After a week you stop reading labels.

Keep labels to one or two words. "Complaints" is better than "Negative customer sentiment about pricing", which is a description and won't fit on a narrow column.

Test every column before you trust it

Open each column on its own and scroll through the first screen of results. Ask two things. Are most of these posts relevant? Would I have wanted to see the ones that are?

If the column is noisy, add an exclusion or a second required word. If it's empty, remove operators one at a time until results appear; the last one you removed was too strict. Engagement thresholds are the usual culprit, because a min_faves:500 that works for a global brand returns nothing for a local bakery.

Test again a week later. Search results change with the news, and a column that was quiet on Monday may be flooded by an unrelated story on Friday.

Set a reading routine

Without alerts, a board is only as good as the schedule you read it on. A routine that works for most small teams:

Morning: open the action columns (questions, problems, complaints) on the Latest tab and work through everything since yesterday.
Midday: a quick pass over the same columns.
End of the week: open the Top and media columns, note anything worth sharing with the team, and adjust queries that drifted.

The planner's Open all button opens every column in its own tab. Most browsers allow only one new tab per click, so if yours blocks the rest, the planner lists the links, or you can allow pop-ups for the site.

The planner saves your board in your browser automatically. That copy lives on one device, so export a JSON file now and then as a backup. It takes a second and survives a cleared browser.

To give a colleague the same board, copy a share link. The whole board is encoded in the link, after the # sign, so they don't need an account and the board never passes through our server. If your team also uses X Pro, the planner is a good place to draft and test queries before adding them as columns there.

You can also save individual searches inside X: run the search, then use the menu next to the search box to save it. Saved searches appear when you tap the search field, on the web and in the apps, which is handy on a phone.

When a free board isn't enough

A board of searches has real limits. You can't get historical totals or charts, you can't be alerted the moment a post appears, and X's search doesn't promise to return every matching post. If you need reports for clients, guaranteed coverage or alerts, that's what paid listening tools charge for.

For most people, though, the problem was never coverage. It was reading the right posts every day, and a board with four sharp columns handles that well. If you'd rather not start from scratch, load one of the starter boards or a keyword board and change the term.

Questions

How many columns should a monitoring board have?

Start with four to six. Fewer than four usually means one column is doing several jobs and getting noisy; more than eight is hard to read in one sitting. Power Search allows up to twelve if you need them.

Can I get alerts when a column has new posts?

Not from a plain search. X can notify you about posts from specific accounts you follow, but there is no free alert for a search query. A fixed reading schedule is the free substitute.

Do I need an X account?

Yes. X only shows search results to signed-in users, so you need an account to open the columns, though it doesn't need to be a paid one.