Last updated: September 2026
Key Takeaways
- Twitter became X in July 2023. Tweets are posts, the handle still starts with @, and almost every older guide to setting one up describes screens that no longer exist.
- Your handle must be more than 4 and no more than 15 characters, using only letters, numbers and underscores. Your display name can be up to 50 characters and is a completely separate field.
- X will not let you claim any handle containing the words “x” or “admin” unless you are an official X account. If your brand name has an x in it, find this out now rather than at the signup screen.
- Change your handle and the old one becomes available to anyone else immediately. For a business with printed material and backlinks pointing at the old URL, that is a real brand-protection problem.
- X reaches 22.2 million people in India, fewer than Reddit or Threads, per DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report. Setting up the handle is still worth 30 minutes. Building a content programme on it usually is not.
- The account is free. Looking verified is not: X Premium starts around Rs 170 a month in India, and a gold Verified Organizations badge starts at 200 US dollars a month.
Honestly? This is the platform we give the most cautious advice about.
Not because setting up a handle is hard. It takes half an hour. Because the question people mean when they ask how to make one is usually “should we be doing this”, and those two questions have different answers now.
DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report puts X’s reach in India at 22.2 million people, behind Reddit at 30.8 million and Threads at 26.6 million. Instagram reaches 481 million. That is not the platform the earlier version of this article was written about.
Here’s our position, and we will defend it below: claim the handle, protect the name, publish a pinned post, and then decide separately and honestly whether you have a reason to keep going.
This guide covers the whole setup, the naming rules that trip people up, and what it actually costs to look legitimate.
What Is an X Handle?
Your handle is the unique @name that identifies your account, forms your profile URL, and is what people type to mention you. It is not the same thing as your display name, which is the larger text above it and can be almost anything you like.
That difference caused half the confusion in the original version of this article, so it is worth being precise. @abmedia is a handle. “AB Media” is a display name. One is an address, the other is a label.
The address is the one with consequences, because it is what gets printed on things.
Should You Set One Up at All?
Yes to claiming the name. Probably no to running it as a channel.
We have stopped recommending X as a default platform for Indian businesses, and the reason is the reach figure above. 22.2 million people is a real audience, but it is a heavily concentrated one, and for most categories your customers are simply not there.
Where it genuinely still works: news and media, Indian politics, cricket, crypto and finance, developer and startup communities, and public customer service, where the value is that a visible complaint gets a visible reply and everyone else watching sees it handled.
Outside those, claim the handle anyway. It costs nothing, it stops somebody else using your name, and a pinned post pointing people to where you actually are is a perfectly respectable use of an account. Our rundown of the top social media sites in India puts the reach numbers side by side if you want to check that judgment yourself.
How Do You Create an X Account for Your Business?
1. Sign up with an address the business controls
Go to x.com and start the signup. You will be asked for a name, a phone number or email, and a date of birth.
Use a company email address, not a founder’s personal one, and use a shared inbox if you have one. We have watched more than one business lose access to an account because the only recovery address belonged to someone who left two years ago. Set up two-factor authentication before you do anything else.
The date of birth field confuses people setting up a brand account. It is asking about the person operating the account, not the founding year of the company.
2. Choose the handle carefully, because this is the decision that lasts
X assigns you a handle automatically and it will be terrible. Change it now, before you do anything else.
The rules, from X’s own help documentation: more than 4 characters and no more than 15, using only letters, numbers and underscores. No spaces, no dashes, no full stops.
There is also a rule almost nobody knows about until it stops them. X states that usernames containing the words “x” or “admin” cannot be claimed unless they are official X accounts. If your brand name contains an x, check this before you get attached to a handle.
Our advice on what to actually pick: the trading name, exactly as customers write it, with nothing appended. Avoid year suffixes, avoid “official”, and avoid underscores if you can, because people mistype them and because a handle with an underscore reads as the second choice it usually is.
3. Upload both images before you touch the display name
There is a small trap in the setup flow. X does not let you change your display name during initial setup until both the profile photo and the header have been uploaded.
Per X’s profile documentation, the profile photo is 400 by 400 pixels and the header is 1500 by 500. JPG, PNG or GIF, and animated GIFs are not supported for either, so do not waste an afternoon on one.
The profile photo renders as a circle, so anything in the corners of a square logo is gone. Crop tight to the mark itself. Our design tips for social campaigns covers getting a logo legible at small sizes.
4. Write 160 characters that do a job
The bio caps at 160 characters, which is shorter than an old SMS and far shorter than people plan for.
Spend them on what you sell, who you sell it to, and where you are. Skip the mission statement. The original version of this article said a good bio should be simple, concise and descriptive, and that still holds, we would just add: put your city in it, because location is one of the few things people scan a business bio for.
Add your website link to the dedicated website field rather than burning bio characters on a URL.
5. Pin one post, then stop
A pinned post sits at the top of your profile permanently and is the first thing any visitor reads.
If you plan to use X properly, pin your best piece of work. If you are claiming the name defensively, pin a short post saying what you do and where you are most active, and link to it. That single post turns a dead account into a useful signpost, which is a much better outcome than a profile with no posts and four followers.
What Does It Cost to Look Legitimate?
The account is free. The checkmark is not, and this is the part the older guides could not have told you about.
Verification on X is now a subscription rather than an assessment of whether you are notable. For individuals, X Premium comes in tiers; X cut its Indian prices substantially in July 2025, taking Basic to around Rs 170 a month and Premium to roughly Rs 427 on the web.
For organisations, the gold checkmark comes through Verified Organizations. X announced a Basic tier at 200 US dollars a month, or 2,000 a year, aimed at smaller businesses, with the full tier at 1,000 dollars a month.
Would we pay it? For most Indian small businesses, no. Two hundred dollars a month on a platform reaching 22.2 million people in your country, when the same budget on YouTube or Instagram reaches twenty times as many, is difficult to justify. If you are in one of the categories where X still matters, and particularly if impersonation is a real risk for you, the calculation changes.
FAQs
Can I change my X handle later?
Yes, at any time, and it will not affect your followers, direct messages or replies. But your old handle becomes available for anyone else to claim immediately, which is the part that matters for a business.
People ask this hoping the answer means the decision is low stakes. It is not, and the reason is what happens to the address you are abandoning. X’s documentation states plainly that once you change your username, your previous username is immediately available for use by someone else.
Think about what points at that address. Business cards, packaging, email signatures, your website footer, every article that ever mentioned you, and every link anyone has shared. All of it now resolves to an account you do not control, and in a competitive category somebody will notice.
The failure mode, and we have seen this one play out, is the rebrand. A company changes its handle, forgets that a supplier catalogue printed the old one, and four months later the old @name belongs to an unrelated account that its customers are now messaging.
The workaround costs you a little admin: register a second free account and park the old handle on it before you release it. You give up a few minutes and an email address, and you keep control of your own history.
Decision rule: never change a handle that appears on anything printed unless you have somewhere to park the old one first.
What if the handle I want is already taken?
Add an underscore or a short qualifier rather than waiting. X does not release inactive usernames, so the abandoned 2011 account sitting on your brand name is not going to free up.
That last point is the one people refuse to accept, and it wastes a lot of time. X’s own guidance is explicit that inactive usernames cannot currently be released, so writing to support about a dormant account will not work.
Before you conclude it is taken, rule out the other explanations. The handle may be over 15 characters. It may contain a dash or a full stop, which are not permitted. It may contain the words “x” or “admin”, which X blocks outright. Or it may belong to a suspended or deactivated account, in which case it is held rather than free.
If it genuinely is taken, X suggests an underscore before or after the name. We would prefer a meaningful qualifier over a bare underscore: your city, your country, or the word your customers already associate with you. It is easier to say aloud, which matters more than it sounds.
The cost of picking a compromise handle is permanent, small friction: slightly harder to remember, slightly harder to dictate over the phone. The cost of waiting for the perfect one is that you never launch.
Decision rule: give it ten minutes, take the best available variant, and make your display name the clean version of your brand.
Does an X business account cost anything?
No. Creating and running a business account on X is free. What costs money is verification, advertising, and API access if you want to plug the account into other tools.
The confusion here is real, because X has made the free tier deliberately less visible. There is no separate product called a business account that you sign up for. You create an ordinary account and use it for a business, which is exactly what everyone did before 2023.
Where money enters: X Premium for individuals, which in India starts at roughly Rs 170 a month on the Basic tier after the July 2025 price cut. Verified Organizations for companies, starting at 200 US dollars a month. Advertising, which is separate again. And API access, where the free tier is now so limited that any real automation means a paid plan.
The failure mode is buying Premium to fix reach. A checkmark does not create an audience, and on a dormant account it advertises that you paid for something you are not using.
The tradeoff of staying free is that unverified accounts do get lower visibility in replies and search on X. If you are not publishing, that costs you nothing at all.
Decision rule: stay on the free account until you have posted consistently for a quarter and can name what a paid tier would change.
Is X still worth it for an Indian business in 2026?
For most, no as a content channel, yes as a name to claim. X reaches 22.2 million people in India, behind both Reddit and Threads.
The instinct that X still matters is strong and it is worth naming why. Journalists, marketers, founders and policy people are still there, so if you are one of those, your feed tells you the platform is central. Your customers’ feeds may not exist at all.
Concretely, we would invest in X if you are in news or media, Indian politics, cricket, crypto or finance, developer tools, or if a meaningful share of your customer complaints arrive publicly and are better answered in public. That last case is genuinely valuable and consistently underrated.
The failure mode is the abandoned handle. You register it, post enthusiastically for three weeks, then stop, and now anyone checking finds a business that visibly gave up in 2026. That reads worse than having no account at all.
The cost of the defensive approach, claiming the name and leaving a pinned signpost, is close to zero. The cost of half-running it is your credibility with exactly the people who bothered to look you up.
Decision rule: claim the handle and pin a signpost post. Only commit properly if you are in one of the categories above and can post at least twice a week for six months.
Why does my profile picture keep getting cropped?
Because X displays profile photos as circles and header images at a wide 3:1 ratio, so anything you place near an edge or a corner disappears. Use 400 by 400 pixels for the profile photo and 1500 by 500 for the header.
The real problem behind this question is usually a logo that was designed for a letterhead. A horizontal wordmark with a tagline under it cannot survive a circular crop, and squeezing it to fit produces something illegible at the size it actually renders in a feed.
What to do instead: use the mark rather than the full logo for the profile photo, cropped tight with a little breathing room, and keep the full wordmark for the header. On the header, keep anything important in the middle third, because the profile photo overlaps the lower left corner and mobile crops the sides further.
One specification that saves time: X does not support animated GIFs for profile or header images, so an animated logo is wasted work.
The tradeoff is that a tightly cropped mark is less informative than a full logo. Someone who does not already know your brand learns nothing from it, which is why the display name and bio have to carry that weight.
Decision rule: if your logo is not legible as a circle at the size of a thumbnail, do not shrink it. Use a cropped mark, an initial, or a single icon.
Should my handle match my Instagram and LinkedIn names?
Yes, and check availability everywhere before you claim anything anywhere. Matching handles are worth more than a slightly better name on one platform.
What makes this worth caring about is not tidiness, it is that people guess. Someone who follows you on Instagram and wants you on X will type the handle they already know. If it resolves to nothing, or to somebody else, you have lost them at the cheapest possible moment.
The constraint that decides it for you is X’s 15-character cap, which is the tightest of the major platforms. Work out your X handle first, then claim the same string elsewhere, rather than choosing a 22-character Instagram name and discovering it cannot exist on X.
Do the same check for the platforms you actually intend to use. Our guides to creating an Instagram business account and setting up a LinkedIn Page cover their own naming rules, and LinkedIn’s public URL rules are stricter than most people expect.
The cost of insisting on a perfect match is that you may end up with a shortened name on every platform rather than an ideal one on your main platform. That is usually the right trade, and occasionally it is not.
Decision rule: check X first because it is the most restrictive, claim the same handle everywhere including platforms you are not using yet, and only break the match if your main platform’s name is genuinely much better.
Conclusion
Half an hour today: claim the handle, upload both images, write 160 honest characters, pin a post that tells people where you actually are.
Then be honest about the second question. If you are not in news, politics, cricket, finance, developer tools or public customer service, X is probably not where your next customer is, and the hour a week it would take belongs somewhere with 481 million people in it.
That is not a reason to skip the setup. A claimed name costs you nothing and protects something. It is a reason to be clear-eyed about what comes after it, which is the argument we make in full in our guide to building a social media strategy. If you are local, Google Business Profile would be a better use of the same afternoon, and how often to post sets expectations for whatever you do commit to.
Not sure whether your business is one of the exceptions? Get in touch with AB Media and we will tell you straight, including when the answer is that you should not bother.
