How to Connect Social Media Accounts in Metricool

Connecting your accounts is the first thing you’ll do in Metricool, and everything else builds on it. Once your profiles are linked, you can schedule posts, read your analytics, reply to messages, and run reports from one place instead of jumping between apps and tabs.

This guide covers what you can connect, how to do it, how Metricool keeps your accounts organized, and what to do when a connection needs attention.

Why Connect Your Accounts in One Place

Bringing your profiles together in Metricool changes how you work day to day:

• Save Time: Schedule posts, answer comments, and check metrics for every platform without switching between apps.
• Keep Your Strategy Consistent: Seeing all your content in one calendar makes it easier to hold a steady brand voice and posting rhythm across networks.
• Compare Performance Side by Side: With every account connected, you can look at engagement across platforms, spot your best-performing formats, and understand how each audience behaves.
• Reply from One Inbox: Comments and direct messages from your connected profiles land in a single place, so nothing slips through.
• Work as a Team: Agencies and teams can collaborate on content and approvals without sharing login credentials.
• Track Paid and Organic Together: Connect your ad accounts alongside your organic profiles to see campaign results next to your reach.
• Post at Better Times: Metricool gives you best-times-to-post suggestions for each network based on your own data.

How Metricool Organizes Your Accounts: Brands

A Brand is your container for a single business or client. Each Brand holds one profile per platform, so one Instagram account, one Facebook Page, one TikTok account, and so on.

If you manage several businesses, clients, or locations, you’ll create a separate Brand for each. Each Brand has its own unique identifier (called a blog ID) that ties your data to it.

On the Free plan, you get one Brand, and you can’t create or delete additional ones. Premium plans let you add and remove Brands as your client list changes. Check the available plans to see how many Brands each one includes.

Each Brand supports only one account per platform. If you manage two TikTok accounts, for example, you’ll need a separate Brand for each.

What You Can Connect in Metricool

From the connections dashboard, you can link all of the following under a Brand:

• A website or blog
• A Facebook Page
• A professional Instagram account (Business or Creator)
• A Threads account
• An X (Twitter) account (Premium plans only)
• A Bluesky account
• A LinkedIn profile or page (not available on Free plans)
• A Pinterest account
• A TikTok account
• A Google Business Profile location
• A YouTube channel
• A Twitch channel
• A Meta Ads account
• A Google Ads account
• A TikTok Ads account

Each platform’s API works a little differently, so some features available natively aren’t open to third-party tools. That’s a platform limitation, not a Metricool one.

Before You Start

A couple of things to have ready:

• An Account: If you don’t have one yet, register for free. You can sign up with your email address, or directly with your Google or Facebook account.
• The Right Permissions: You’ll need admin or owner access on the social accounts you’re connecting. Without it, the authorization step won’t go through.

How to Connect a Social Profile to Metricool

There are two ways to reach the connections dashboard:

• Click the menu (three horizontal bars) at the top right, then Connections.
• Or choose your Brand from the dropdown, then go to Analytics > Brand settings.

From there:

1. Select your Brand from the dropdown.
2. Click the platform you want to connect.
3. Log in with that account’s credentials and follow the authorization flow.
4. Accept all permissions so the tool can publish, pull analytics, and manage messages.
5. Repeat for any other profiles you want in that Brand.

Accepting all permissions matters. Metricool only uses them for the features you’d expect, like analytics, publishing, and engagement, and never for anything else. If you skip a permission, some functions won’t work.

Connecting Meta Platforms (Facebook and Instagram)

Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts are often connected together, since Meta links them.

1. Click the Facebook or Instagram icon.
2. A Meta pop-up will ask for permissions. Accept all of them.
3. Log in to your personal Facebook profile if prompted. Facebook Pages and Instagram Business or Creator accounts are managed through a personal profile.
4. Select the specific Page or Instagram profile you want to connect.
5. Confirm the connection.

A few things to keep in mind for Meta:

• Your Instagram account must be a Business or Creator account, not a personal one, to get full functionality.
• For publishing and scheduling, you can connect Instagram directly with your credentials. For every feature, your Instagram account needs to be linked to a Facebook Page, and that link has to be set up on both sides.
• The Facebook profile you use should have Full Control or Admin access to the Page.

Instagram has two different connection types in Metricool. If you ever reconnect, use the same method you used originally so your previous data comes back correctly.

Connecting TikTok

1. Click the TikTok icon.
2. Log in on TikTok’s authorization page.
3. Accept all permissions.
4. You’ll return to Metricool with the account connected.

Connecting LinkedIn

1. Click the LinkedIn icon.
2. Log in with your personal LinkedIn credentials.
3. Choose whether to connect your personal profile or a Company Page you manage.
4. Accept the permissions to publish and read analytics.
5. Confirm. (LinkedIn isn’t available on Free plans.)

Connecting X (Twitter)

1. Click the X icon.
2. Log in on X’s authorization page.
3. Click Authorize app.
4. Your account will be linked. (X is available on Premium plans only.)

Connecting Pinterest

1. Click the Pinterest icon.
2. Log in to Pinterest.
3. Allow Metricool to access your profile and boards.
4. Confirm.

Connecting YouTube

1. Click the YouTube icon.
2. Choose the Google account tied to your channel.
3. Grant the permissions.
4. If the account has more than one channel, pick the one you want.
5. Confirm.

Connecting Google Business Profile

1. Click the Google Business Profile icon.
2. Choose the Google account tied to your locations.
3. Grant the permissions.
4. Select the specific location or locations you want.
5. Confirm. You can now manage reviews and posts.

Connecting Ad Platforms

You can connect Meta Ads, Google Ads, and TikTok Ads alongside your organic profiles, which gives you paid and organic results in one view.

1. Click the icon for the ad platform you want.
2. Log in and grant access to your ad accounts. You’ll need administrative permissions on the platform’s side (for example, Business Manager for Meta Ads).
3. Choose the specific ad accounts to monitor.
4. Confirm. Those accounts will start feeding data into Metricool for reporting and campaign creation.

Connecting Your Website or Blog

1. Choose Website/Blog from the connections list.
2. Enter your site’s URL.
3. To pull in traffic data, connect Google Analytics and follow the prompts to authorize it. This adds website numbers to your Metricool reports.

API Integrations

For custom dashboards and automated workflows, you can connect Metricool to other tools through its API:

• Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) has a native connector for building custom reports from your Metricool data. It’s a good fit for advanced dashboards and client reporting.
• Zapier and Make let you automate tasks and build your own integrations using the Metricool API.

Historical Data When You Connect

When you connect a new profile, Metricool pulls in the previous 30 days of data. After that, everything is tracked going forward, and it may take a few minutes for the first data to appear.

A few metrics are the exception and only start from the day you connect, since the platform APIs don’t make earlier figures available:

• Follower counts on X (Twitter), TikTok, and Instagram
• YouTube subscribers
• Instagram Stories

Premium accounts can request a manual process to calculate a full year of history.

Best Practices for Connecting Securely

Connecting through an API is safe, and a few habits keep things that way:

• Use strong, unique passwords for both your social accounts and your Metricool account.
• Turn on two-factor authentication everywhere you can.
• Understand the permissions you grant. Accepting all of them keeps every feature working, and each one maps to a specific Metricool function.
• Give team members only the access they need. Use Metricool’s user management to assign roles per Brand so collaborators see only what’s relevant to them. (User management is available on Advanced and Enterprise plans.)
• Check your connected apps now and then in your social platforms’ security settings to confirm only the apps you trust have access.
• Refresh connections when prompted. Platforms sometimes ask you to re-authenticate after a security update or password change. Doing it promptly keeps your data and publishing uninterrupted.

How Long Connections Last

Each platform issues an access token with its own lifespan. When a token expires, you’ll need to reconnect. Here’s roughly how long each one lasts:

Expiration isn’t the only thing that ends a connection. Password changes and a platform’s own security measures can also disconnect an account. For X specifically, the API doesn’t set an expiration date, but X can revoke a token at any time for reasons like multiple logins or suspicious activity.

What Happens When a Network Disconnects

A network can disconnect manually or because the platform revoked its permissions. Either way, here’s what to expect.

Your synced data is preserved. Disconnecting doesn’t delete the analytics, posts, and metrics Metricool already pulled in. As long as you reconnect the same account to the same Brand, that history comes back.

Reconnect the same account to the same Brand. If you connect a different account instead, only data collected from that point forward belongs to the new account, and the old history stays tied to the original. When you do need to switch to a different account, the right approach is to delete the Brand and create a new one with the connections you want.

Scheduled posts stay in the Planner. They won’t disappear, but if the network isn’t connected when a post’s scheduled time arrives, it can’t publish and will show an error. Reconnect before any posts are due.

Watch out when connecting a different account to the same Brand. Scheduled posts will publish to the new account rather than the original, which can send content to the wrong place. Deleting the Brand and starting fresh avoids this.

Some metrics can’t be recovered for the gap. Instagram follower history isn’t backfilled, and Instagram Stories data can’t be retrieved for the time the account was disconnected. The longer the gap, the more you lose.

If you want a backup before making changes, export your calendar as a CSV from the Planning section. You can re-import it later if needed.

The same rules apply when you revoke and re-authorize permissions rather than disconnecting outright. Reconnect the same day when you can, then check your Planner for upcoming posts and watch for any that errored during the gap.

How to Refresh a Connection

Sometimes a connection needs a refresh rather than a full reconnect. Common reasons are changes to a platform’s API, expired or updated permissions (for example, an admin change on Facebook or an expired LinkedIn token), or simply pulling in the most recent data. Until you refresh, some functions won’t be available.

To refresh:

1. Select the Brand and open the connections dashboard.
2. Click the X next to the account name to disconnect the current connection.
3. Click Connect. The platform’s pop-up will appear.
4. Log in (or continue if you’re already logged in) and accept all permissions if asked.
5. Once reconnected, your data syncs again automatically.

For Instagram, remember the two connection types. Check which one you’re using and reconnect with the same method so your previous data returns correctly.

Adding Competitors

You can also connect competitor accounts to benchmark your performance against others in your industry. Competitors shows public data, so you don’t need any private access to the accounts you’re tracking. Adding your own account as a competitor is a useful way to compare it against others.

To add one:

1. Go to Analytics.
2. Open the Competitors section.
3. Click Add.
4. Enter or search for the account, depending on the network.
5. Click Add to finish.

Availability depends on your plan and the network:

On the Free plan you can explore the feature as a demo: add up to 5 accounts per network, with no editing or deleting once they’re added. YouTube shows two competitors by default with no option to add more.

On Premium plans you can add up to 100 competitors per network (10 on YouTube) and manage, edit, and adjust them freely.

A few network-specific notes:

• Instagram requires your account to be linked to Metricool through Facebook, and you can only add professional accounts.
• Facebook lets you add Pages only, not personal profiles.
• Threads competitors must be public, over 18, and have more than 100 followers.
• YouTube needs the channel name or a URL that includes /channel/ or /user/.
• X is Premium only with the paid add-on, and some private or unindexed accounts may not appear.

Once Your Accounts Are Connected

Connecting your accounts is a one-time setup that changes how the rest of your week runs. Once your profiles are in one place, scheduling, analytics, replies, and reports stop being separate jobs across separate tabs and become part of a single routine. You plan once, check your numbers in one view, and answer messages without hunting through apps.

If a connection ever drops, you now know what to expect and how to bring it back without losing your history.

If you don’t have an account yet, you can create one for free and connect your first profile in a couple of minutes.