Connect X
Approved posts, threads and image posts publish themselves, and impressions, replies and reposts come back every six hours without you typing them.
Connecting X is what turns "here's a post to paste" into Ballad posting for you. It's also the only network where Ballad reads the numbers back by itself, so posts you approve there need nothing from you afterwards.
1. Connect the account to a voice
Accounts belong to voices, not to the workspace: your founder voice posts from your account, the brand voice from the company's. In Ballad: Settings → Voices → the voice → X accounts → Connect.
X asks you to authorise Ballad. What it grants:
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Read and write posts | To publish what you approved, and read your own posts back |
| Read your profile | To show which handle a voice posts from |
| Upload media | For image posts and carousels |
| Offline access | So the connection survives without asking you to sign in again |
Ballad refreshes the connection on its own. If it ever can't, the row shows Connect again rather than failing quietly.
2. What publishes automatically
Once connected, approved posts, threads and image posts go out on their slot, or immediately if you approved them as "post now". A thread is posted in order as one chain.
If a post fails to send, Ballad retries on the next tick, and after a few attempts it falls back to handing you the post to put up by hand rather than pretending it went out. Threads resume from where they stopped: the posts already live are never duplicated.
3. What comes back
Every six hours Ballad reads impressions, likes, reposts, replies and bookmarks for its posts — including posts you put up by hand and pasted the link for — so it never has to ask you how a post on X did.
Replies come back too, each with an answer drafted for the ones worth answering, and you send your reply straight from the Inbox. Reading replies uses X's search API, which needs a paid X API plan; without one, everything else still works and Ballad simply doesn't fetch replies.
Reconnecting
Two cases where the row asks you to reconnect:
- Access lapsed. X refused a refresh — usually because the app's access was revoked on X's side.
- Image posts fail but text posts work. An account connected before Ballad supported images doesn't carry the media permission. Reconnect once and it does.
Disconnect removes Ballad's access to that account. Drafts keep being written; they're handed to you to post instead.
Next
- Social media — the rest of the channels.
- Connect LinkedIn — the other one that posts for you.
- Signals — where the numbers land.