X remains crucial for public relations teams in 2026, primarily for its speed and its unique data feed. The platform carries roughly 550 million users and generated about $1.8 billion in ad sales in 2025, down from Twitter's $4.4 billion in 2022. Despite that decline, X still offers unmatched real-time news dissemination and directly feeds xAI's Grok chatbot, and PR professionals need a presence there for crisis response and media relations.
Updated Oct 24, 2026. Now includes the audience-growth, B2B and launch playbook.
X performs three critical functions that communications teams cannot easily replace elsewhere. It manages the fastest real-time news cycle of any platform. It holds the working relationships PR teams have with reporters and editors. It now feeds Grok, xAI's chatbot, which draws on X's live data stream in ways no other AI engine can match. Teams that dropped X after the ad exodus lost the speed layer, not just an ad line item.
Who needs this guide?
PR and communications teams: Use this guide for running rapid-response media relations.
Crisis teams: Apply this guide to monitor and respond inside a news cycle measured in minutes, not hours.
B2B marketing teams: Refer to this guide for using X for lead generation alongside LinkedIn.
Agencies: Consult this guide to decide how much of a client's social budget X still deserves.
What is X, and how has it changed?
Twitter rebranded to X in July 2023, following Elon Musk's October 2022 acquisition. The platform then moved through a rapid ownership chain: xAI acquired X in March 2025, and SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026. For the Musk side of the story, see Elon Musk's PR strategy. Two changes matter most for a PR team.
Why did advertisers leave X?
Advertisers left X, and most have not fully returned. Ad revenue fell from $4.4 billion in 2022 to roughly $1.8 billion in 2025, a 59 percent decline following the November 2023 advertiser exodus. Brands still running paid X campaigns operate in a much smaller, more concentrated ad marketplace than they were three years ago.
How does Grok use X's live data?
Grok turned X's live feed into AI training and retrieval infrastructure. xAI's Grok chatbot pulls on X's real-time data stream, which means posts on X can surface inside Grok's answers faster than content on any platform without that direct feed.
Which X surfaces matter for a communications team?
The real-time feed: This is still the fastest place a story breaks or a crisis compounds, hours before most other channels catch up.
Verified organization and executive accounts: This is the identity layer reporters check to confirm a statement is official.
Grok: This is X's own AI layer, drawing on the platform's live posts. It is increasingly a retrieval surface brands need to account for, similar to how they account for Google or ChatGPT.
X Ads: This is a smaller, more concentrated marketplace than 2022's Twitter Ads, covered in detail in the X ad inventory map.
Account security: SIM-swap and account-takeover risk is a standing operational concern for any brand or executive account with real reach, covered in X account security for 2026.
Community Notes: Crowd-sourced context can attach to brand statements, executive posts, or crisis claims. Once a note activates, it is mostly outside brand control.
What changed for crisis response on X?
Crisis response on X works differently than it did on the Twitter teams trained on in the 2010s, even though speed still decides outcomes. Verification became a paid product (X Premium), which weakened the blue check as identity confirmation. Gold checkmarks for organizations and gray checkmarks for government accounts add identity layers at a higher cost. Algorithm reach for brand accounts shifted toward paid amplification and verified accounts, and Community Notes added a crowd-sourced check that brands cannot switch off.
What still works: fast, substantive engagement beats flat denial. Executive accounts often travel further than the corporate account. Statements posted as images of formal letters still perform. Coordinating X with LinkedIn, the brand website and other channels typically beats an X-only response. For a worked example of a calm, fact-first response to a false claim, see the Wendy's chili finger hoax case study.
What are the best X plays for PR teams in 2026?
Four strategies cover most of what a communications team needs from the platform today.
Treat X as the fastest crisis lane.
Treat X as the fastest lane in a crisis plan, not the only lane. A story that breaks on X still moves faster than a press release can. Pre-cleared statements and a named spokesperson account ready to post are more valuable than a fast writer scrambling after the fact.
Lock down account security before a crisis.
Lock down executive and brand account security before a crisis, not during one. Passkeys and SIM-swap protection are the baseline. An account takeover during a live news cycle is a second crisis stacked on the first.
Use X for B2B lead generation.
Use X for B2B lead generation alongside LinkedIn, not instead of it. X's B2B audience is smaller than LinkedIn's, but it reaches founders, operators, and journalists who are otherwise hard to reach directly. The founder-led discipline is covered below.
Monitor Grok mentions of the brand.
Monitor what Grok says about the brand the same way teams monitor ChatGPT and Claude. Grok's live-feed advantage means it can pick up a story or a sentiment shift faster than AI engines without direct platform access.
What doesn't work on X anymore?
Two habits that used to be safe now carry real risk.
Treating X as a broadcast-only channel
Treating X as a broadcast-only channel no longer works. The audience is smaller and more concentrated than it was as Twitter. A brand posting without monitoring replies or Grok mentions misses where the real conversation about it is happening.
Assuming ad reach matches media-relations value
Assuming the platform's ad reach matches its media-relations value is a mistake. The two are no longer correlated. A brand can gain real crisis and reporter value from X while getting weak returns from its ad account. Budgeting for both the same way misreads the platform.
How do you grow an audience on X in 2026?
Audience growth on X in 2026 is about producing content that AI engines, including Grok, pull when answering questions about a person, brand or category, not about hashtag mechanics. The accounts compounding fastest post the most useful, named, sourced content on one category, not the most posts.
Five product changes shaped growth mechanics. The For You feed is the dominant surface and recommends content from accounts people do not follow. X has said Premium subscriber posts get boosted visibility. Verification became a paid product. The creator revenue share rewards engagement from Premium subscribers. Premium also allows posts up to 25,000 characters, so essays and long threads are viable.
Layer
What it means
Profile
Bio, pinned post and header. A specific value proposition, named credentials and a pinned post that shows the account at its best.
Content
Original takes, named data and specific arguments. Threads that develop a category point of view.
Engagement
Replies to accounts above and below, until the account is a known contributor in a specific conversation set.
Citation
Whether AI engines name the account when answering category questions, which is the new long-term metric.
What wins: specific, sourced takes within hours of a category event; original published data; threads with a thesis; substantive replies to bigger named accounts; depth in one niche community; and an operator voice that shares work in progress. What loses: polished corporate accounts that post only milestones, engagement bait, generic threads on hot topics, and cross-posting from LinkedIn or Instagram without rewriting for X.
What power users do differently. Operators who build audiences in the 100K to 2M range, such as Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Visakan Veerasamy, Aella and Mario Nawfal, share seven habits: they post threads instead of standalone posts, keep a daily cadence, own one or two defined categories, reply at scale, write bookmarkable frameworks, use Premium economics, and treat X as the discovery layer for a newsletter, podcast or book. Branded hashtag campaigns, episodic newsjacking and follower-count optimization in isolation are largely gone.
Days
90-day build plan
1 to 14
Lock the profile, define the category, and run a baseline audit of what Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini say about the account.
15 to 45
Post one substantive piece a day: two threads a week, four clear-take posts a week and 10-plus replies to bigger accounts. Track what gets cited, bookmarked or quoted.
46 to 75
Double down on the category, format and reply pattern that worked, and cut the rest.
76 to 90
Re-audit AI citation. Accounts compounding correctly tend to appear in Grok answers first, then in other engines over 6 to 12 months.
How do B2B companies grow, launch and generate leads on X?
B2B growth on X runs on founder-led content, reply-thread substance and AI citation density, not impressions. Four moves build a durable presence:
Founder-led content. The CEO or a named executive posts daily from a personal account, and the brand account amplifies. Patrick Collison, Jensen Huang, Eric Glyman and Guillermo Rauch are among the executives who run the discipline at scale.
Reply-thread substance. The headline post is the announcement, and the replies carry product detail, technical substance and customer stories, which gives AI engines retrieval anchors.
Reply velocity. The first 60 to 90 minutes shape distribution, so line up employee, customer and partner amplification in that window.
Cross-platform compounding. X posts get clipped to LinkedIn, repurposed into newsletters and quoted in trade press.
Launches follow three structural moves: a founder-led announcement from the personal account, a reply-thread architecture where replies hold the detail, and a community-amplification window in the first 60 to 90 minutes. Direct lead generation on X has narrowed since LinkedIn took over company-anchored leads. What remains is founder-led authority, customer-story threads that draw inbound DMs, substantive replies on category conversations, and compounding into LinkedIn and email capture. Track engagement rate on owned posts, reply-thread depth and AI citation share, not raw impressions. Paid amplification works as fuel on a post already performing organically, not as ignition for a flat one.
Smaller ad audience, concentrated advertiser base since 2023
Rapid response, media relations, live commentary
Facebook
Paid acquisition at scale, crisis response speed, Group retention
Near-zero organic reach without ad spend
Brand identity, paid campaigns, crisis protocol
LinkedIn
B2B credibility, executive thought leadership, hiring signal
Limited consumer reach outside professional contexts
Executive visibility, B2B lead generation
YouTube
Buyer-intent search, long-form authority, AI transcript citation
Slow to build, requires sustained production
Category authority, creator partnerships
Most communications teams keep X for its speed and reporter access. They run paid acquisition through Facebook and Instagram. B2B lead generation relies on a mix of X and LinkedIn, depending on the audience. For the text-first alternative, see Threads, Meta's X alternative.
How is X changing communications teams' work?
The X account itself got riskier, and the audience got smaller. However, the reason to stay did not disappear: nothing else matches X for the speed a story or a crisis moves at. What changed is the operating discipline underneath it. Account security, Grok monitoring, and a pre-cleared crisis stack are now standard practice in a way they were not on Twitter in 2019.
X's public relations value survived its ad revenue collapse because speed and reporter access never depended on ad spend in the first place. Teams that dropped the platform entirely after 2023 gave up the fastest lane in their own crisis plan.
Yes, mainly for speed. X remains the fastest platform for breaking news and reporter relationships, even though its ad reach and advertiser base shrank by a wide margin since the 2023 rebrand.
How much has X's ad revenue fallen?
From $4.4 billion in 2022 to roughly $1.8 billion in 2025, a 59 percent decline, following the November 2023 advertiser exodus.
What is Grok, and why does it matter for PR?
Grok is xAI's chatbot, built on X's live data stream. Because it draws directly on X posts, it can surface a brand's coverage or sentiment faster than AI engines without that direct platform access.
Should a brand still run paid ads on X?
Only with realistic expectations. The ad marketplace is smaller and more concentrated than it was as Twitter, so budget should reflect X's strength in speed and reach to reporters, not Twitter-era ad performance.
What is the biggest operational risk on X for a brand account?
Account takeover, particularly through SIM-swap attacks. Passkeys and account security should be in place before a crisis, not set up during one.
Does X still matter for B2B lead generation?
Yes, as a complement to LinkedIn. X's B2B audience is smaller but reaches founders, operators, and journalists who are otherwise hard to contact directly.
Should a brand still pay for verification on X?
Generally yes for major brands and executives, mainly for identity assertion, since reporters check the identity layer to confirm a statement is official.
How do you build an audience on X in 2026?
Lock the profile, choose one category, post substantive original content daily, reply to bigger accounts with real substance, and measure AI citation as well as follower growth.
Does X Premium help you grow?
X has said Premium posts receive boosted visibility, and the revenue share requires Premium. It helps distribution, but content quality and category focus decide whether an audience sticks.
Do hashtags still matter on X?
Less than they did. They can help for live events, but the fastest-growing accounts use one or two sparingly and rely on content quality and engagement with named accounts.
Should brand accounts and personal accounts behave differently?
Yes. Pair a measured brand account for milestones with a founder or executive voice for real-time commentary. The founder voice is usually the higher-leverage one.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team is the staff byline for news, analysis and features on communications, reputation, AI visibility and digital discovery. Everything-PR has published since 2009. AI tools assist with research and drafting, and every article is reviewed by a human editor before publication. Coverage follows the Editorial Policy, and substantive corrections are noted on the article under the Corrections Policy.
