Scientific American engagement report
@sciam - 4.3M followers on X
Measured over 129 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 31, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 51 interactions against 4.3M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 129 original posts, its engagement rate beats 20% of 3,739 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 18K times each, and 0.284% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.423% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 4.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 67% of days. Most posts go out around 19:00 UTC, and Wednesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 129 posts sampled, 100% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 1.7K interactions, about 33x its own typical post.
Measured over 129 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 31, 2026.
Compared with accounts its own size
Scientific American's engagement rate beats 20% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,739 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 10 of 10)). A percentile is spread evenly by construction, so 50 really is the middle of that group and 90 really is its top tenth.
On engagement per impression rather than per follower it beats 26% of the same group. When those two numbers disagree, the gap is about how far its posts travel rather than how people react to them.
Where this sits in the catalog
At 0.001%, Scientific American sits below the 10th percentile of the 36,378 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the bottom 25% band, which runs below 0.012%.
Show the percentile table
| Percentile | Engagement rate |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 0.002% |
| 25th percentile | 0.012% |
| 50th percentile | 0.08% |
| 75th percentile | 0.432% |
| 90th percentile | 2.10% |
| 99th percentile | 161.0% |
This ruler is the whole measured catalog, not a size-matched group: it shows where the raw rate falls across every account we can measure, all of which are large. For a like-for-like comparison, read the size-band percentile above instead. See how the bands are built
Posting timing
This account posts most often around 19:00 UTC, and Wednesday is its busiest day of the week. The bars below are the catalog-wide pattern, with this account's own busiest slot marked. They do not show how this account performs at each hour: we keep one aggregate per account, not one per hour, so that measurement does not exist in our data.
Show engagement by hour posted, utc as a table
| Hour (UTC) | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 UTC | -1% | 50K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 51K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 50K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 53K |
| 04:00 UTC | -6% | 43K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 42K |
| 06:00 UTC | -4% | 48K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 52K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 60K |
| 09:00 UTC | -3% | 69K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 72K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 78K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 86K |
| 13:00 UTC | -2% | 94K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 97K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 100K |
| 16:00 UTC | -3% | 97K |
| 17:00 UTC | -2% | 90K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 84K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 79K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 74K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 66K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 57K |
| 23:00 UTC | -2% | 51K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +4% | 230K |
| Monday | 0% | 286K |
| Tuesday | -2% | 276K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 251K |
| Thursday | -1% | 244K |
| Friday | -3% | 252K |
| Saturday | +3% | 227K |
Best tweets
- Aug 24, 202633x their median
Earth's oceans are reaching perilous new temperatures—on August 22, scientists recorded the hottest ever temperature. Experts explain how it is only going to get worse: https://t.co/ss9wK3Cn2l
- Aug 25, 202628x their median
Country music legend Dolly Parton, who died today at 81, donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2020 to help fund an early stage trial of the Moderna COVID vaccine. She received her first dose in 2021 and urged others to do the same. https://t.co/fGgIYZPabc
- Aug 20, 202618x their median
Europe is on fire. It is going to get so, so much worse. https://t.co/iCySAZqarN
- Aug 10, 202618x their median
The president called for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) combined vaccine to be split into separate shots, despite decades of research showing the MMR is safe and effective https://t.co/DsrCXNDcPB
- Aug 21, 202614x their median
The mathematical reality of a $40 trillion national debt is unfathomable. https://t.co/AxfGJl1npG
- Aug 26, 202611x their median
The U.S. just approved a new breakthrough drug for late-stage pancreatic cancer that significantly extends the lives of people with the disease—considered one of the most intractable and difficult to treat forms of cancer https://t.co/U5UVVXrMME
- Aug 19, 20267.1x their median
How does psilocybin alter consciousness to create a profound sense of ‘oneness’? A new study found a "hidden order" in brain activity, where networks responsible for the self and the world integrated. https://t.co/kl7FF5rfL9
- Aug 17, 20266.2x their median
"We’ve got the world’s biggest economy, in my view, not because of real estate developers but because of science and decades and decades of the federal government investing in research and education"—@senmarkkelly https://t.co/mGOnvaIL65
- Aug 22, 20266.1x their median
Traumatic memories are stored in the brain differently from other life events, changing our experience of these memories https://t.co/9DXcavXJA3
- Aug 19, 20265.5x their median
A combined drug made by pharma giants Merck and Moderna uses mRNA technology—the same tech as the COVID vaccines—to target a deadly and common form of skin cancer https://t.co/QpUqjT2hsD
Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.
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Reading these numbers
A typical post picks up 51 interactions against 4.3M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 129 original posts, its engagement rate beats 20% of 3,739 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 18K times each, and 0.284% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.423% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 4.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 67% of days. Most posts go out around 19:00 UTC, and Wednesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 129 posts sampled, 100% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 1.7K interactions, about 33x its own typical post.
- What is Scientific American's engagement rate on X?
- Scientific American (@sciam) has an engagement rate of 0.001%, based on the median interactions across 129 original posts from the last 30 days against 4,251,979 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.001%, Scientific American sits below the 10th percentile of the 36,378 accounts in this comparison. Those comparison accounts are all large ones, because our scanning cadence is weighted towards big accounts, so this is a ranking among peers of similar scale rather than a ranking across X.
- Does @sciam have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 20% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,739 accounts), which puts it in the bottom quarter for its size group. Ranking inside a size band matters because engagement rate falls as accounts grow, so a raw rate would mostly re-measure the follower count. It is a starting point for a look at follower quality, not a verdict on it.
- When does @sciam post?
- Most posts go out around 19:00 UTC, and Wednesday is its busiest day, at roughly 4.4 posts per day across the measured window.