PBS News engagement report
@NewsHour - 1.2M followers on X
Measured over 240 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 1, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 45 interactions against 1.2M followers, an engagement rate of 0.004%. Measured over 240 original posts, its engagement rate beats 23% of 3,829 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 7.7K times each, and 0.582% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.633% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 8 posts a day over the last 30 days, though only 40% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 22:00 UTC, and Tuesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 240 posts sampled, 24% carry an image or video and 77% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 2.5K interactions, about 56x its own typical post.
Measured over 240 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 1, 2026.
Compared with accounts its own size
PBS News's engagement rate beats 23% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,829 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 9 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 37% 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 0.004%, PBS News sits above the 10th percentile of the 37,071 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 | 0.435% |
| 90th percentile | 2.10% |
| 99th percentile | 158.3% |
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 22:00 UTC, and Tuesday 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% | 51K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 52K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 51K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 54K |
| 04:00 UTC | -6% | 44K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 42K |
| 06:00 UTC | -4% | 49K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 53K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 61K |
| 09:00 UTC | -3% | 71K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 73K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 80K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 88K |
| 13:00 UTC | -2% | 96K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 99K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 103K |
| 16:00 UTC | -3% | 100K |
| 17:00 UTC | -2% | 92K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 86K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 81K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 75K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 67K |
| 22:00 UTC | -1% | 58K |
| 23:00 UTC | -1% | 52K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +5% | 234K |
| Monday | 0% | 294K |
| Tuesday | -3% | 288K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 253K |
| Thursday | -2% | 247K |
| Friday | -3% | 256K |
| Saturday | +3% | 230K |
Best tweets
- Aug 23, 202656x their median
“The nationwide cyclospora outbreak is very likely a result of sewage contamination in the food supply, according to scientific researchers and public health officials. The parasite’s spread can become a self-perpetuating cycle,” Joan Rose wrote for The Conversation. https://t.co/mGLkCmmgKh
- Aug 27, 202653x their median
The scale of the disaster in the Himalayas is becoming clearer after catastrophic flooding tore through parts of Nepal and Tibet. Scientists now believe the disaster was likely triggered by the collapse of a glacier high in the mountains, unleashing a torrent of water, mud and debris that swept away entire communities. @GeoffRBennett has more.
- Aug 24, 202645x their median
The trade war between the U.S. and Canada is intensifying after negotiations broke down over the weekend. President Trump announced that tariffs on Canadian-made cars, trucks and auto parts will rise to 50% at the start of the new year, part of a broader round of 50% tariffs covering $28 billion in Canadian goods. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his country had been preparing for a fundamental shift in its relationship with the U.S., which it no longer views as a reliable partner. @GeoffRBennett speaks to @armstrongcbc for more.
- Aug 22, 202643x their median
President Donald Trump is threatening to sue a left-leaning think tank unless it retracts a report that said his National Guard deployments to various cities did not reduce crime as he said. https://t.co/miqHQXbI1G
- Aug 25, 202641x their median
"We're all God's children. We all have a place in this world. We all need to be loved and respected," Dolly Parton told us in 2020. https://t.co/veBEXDSPAl
- Aug 27, 202628x their median
Just seconds after the Trump administration's lawyer began making his case at a nearly two-hour hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper interrupted to ask why the center needed to begin inscribing the president's name on the institution's facade as soon as Sept. 8. https://t.co/XgheBtgei0
- Aug 22, 202628x their median
The editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes says the Pentagon fired him, along with the military newspaper’s publisher and a reporter. Erik Slavin told The Associated Press on Friday that he was dismissed for insubordination after saying in an interview that any form of censorship would “constitute a red line.” The newspaper is partly funded by the Pentagon but has a long history of editorial independence. It was one of the first outlets to report on living conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during the carrier’s extended deployment to the Middle East.
- Aug 29, 202624x their median
A federal judge in California says the U.S. government is unconstitutionally silencing critics of Israel's war in Gaza and others as part of the Trump administration's quest to deport noncitizens who it says disrupted college campuses while expressing their views. https://t.co/OoX836goEv
- Aug 31, 202623x their median
A Florida grand jury found that Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration "misappropriated" $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity connected to his wife, but it declined to file criminal charges due to a lack of evidence indicating who specifically was responsible. https://t.co/Z9hzxliTxO
- Aug 31, 202617x their median
Alarms are being sounded again about the risks of artificial intelligence, after new reports documented how hundreds of OpenAI’s so-called agents violated several restrictions and hacked into another company without being told to do so. Anthropic and Meta have had similar events with their own AI agents going rogue. @WmBrangham speaks to @GaryMarcus for more.
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.
Buy or sell X accounts - escrow-protected
PlayerSells is an escrow marketplace for X accounts. Every deal is protected, with no middleman risk.
Reading these numbers
A typical post picks up 45 interactions against 1.2M followers, an engagement rate of 0.004%. Measured over 240 original posts, its engagement rate beats 23% of 3,829 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 7.7K times each, and 0.582% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.633% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 8 posts a day over the last 30 days, though only 40% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 22:00 UTC, and Tuesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 240 posts sampled, 24% carry an image or video and 77% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 2.5K interactions, about 56x its own typical post.
- What is PBS News's engagement rate on X?
- PBS News (@NewsHour) has an engagement rate of 0.004%, based on the median interactions across 240 original posts from the last 30 days against 1,220,122 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.004%, PBS News sits above the 10th percentile of the 37,071 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 @NewsHour have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 23% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,829 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 @NewsHour post?
- Most posts go out around 22:00 UTC, and Tuesday is its busiest day, at roughly 8 posts per day across the measured window.