The SETI Institute engagement report
@SETIInstitute - 680K followers on X
Measured over 51 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 25, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 43 interactions against 680K followers, an engagement rate of 0.006%. Measured over 51 original posts, its engagement rate beats 27% of 3,809 tracked accounts of a similar size, which puts it in the middle of its size range rather than at either end. Posts are seen about 7.6K times each, and 0.565% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.12% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 1.9 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 63% of days. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Thursday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 51 posts sampled, 61% carry an image or video and 63% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 320 interactions, about 7.4x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #ppod, #setilive, #solareclipse.
Measured over 51 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 25, 2026. Recurring tags: #ppod, #setilive, #solareclipse.
Compared with accounts its own size
The SETI Institute's engagement rate beats 27% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,809 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 8 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 0.006%, The SETI Institute sits above the 10th percentile of the 36,960 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 | 159.8% |
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 15:00 UTC, and Thursday 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% | 70K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 73K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 79K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 87K |
| 13:00 UTC | -2% | 96K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 99K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 102K |
| 16:00 UTC | -3% | 99K |
| 17:00 UTC | -2% | 92K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 85K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 80K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 75K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 67K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 58K |
| 23:00 UTC | -1% | 52K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +5% | 233K |
| Monday | 0% | 292K |
| Tuesday | -3% | 284K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 253K |
| Thursday | -2% | 246K |
| Friday | -3% | 255K |
| Saturday | +3% | 229K |
Best tweets
- Aug 19, 20267.4x their median
#PPOD: @ESA Community Photo 📷️ The total #solareclipse on 12 August 2026 was captured by #yourESA community member Marina Prol in Galicia, Spain. The image shows the meadows of Espiñeira, Cospeito (Lugo), during totality. Credit: Marina Prol https://t.co/uwUMoLq7bI
- Aug 20, 20266.7x their median
#PPOD: Over Lugo, Spain 🌉 The August 12, 2026, total #solareclipse was photographed above the Roman Bridge of Lugo, Spain, and reflected in the Miño River. Taking this photo took three days of planning—scouting good spots in the city to capture a beautiful, representative shot. Photographer Antonio Rull brought two cameras and took 340 photos during the 84 seconds of totality. Credit: Antonio Rull #planetaryscience
- Aug 17, 20266.0x their median
#PPOD: Total Solar Eclipse ☀️ 🌑 🌎️ On August 12, 2026, people across Greenland, Iceland, and Spain witnessed the amazing phenomenon of a total #solareclipse. This week, we'll share some of the images captured by community members in the path of totality. Here, we see the moment of totality from Salou, Spain, along with two insets showing Baily's Beads and an arched prominence. Credit: Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez (ICE-CSIC/IEEC) #planetaryscience
- Aug 21, 20263.4x their median
#PPOD: Solar Eclipse and Sunflowers 🌻 This composite image shows the progression of a total solar eclipse over San Millán de los Caballeros, Spain, on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. Credit: @NASA / Bill Ingalls Did you enjoy the eclipse photos this week? Share yours in the replies! #planetaryscience
- Aug 17, 20263.4x their median
GJ 504 b is unusual. It is cold. It is faint. It sits roughly 43 astronomical units from its star, which is 43 times the Earth-Sun distance and would put it in our system’s Kuiper Belt. And despite being discovered more than a decade ago, astronomers still cannot say with certainty whether it is actually a planet or a brown dwarf. Now, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have a much better look at the object's atmosphere through its infrared spectrum. In a recent #SETILive conversation, host @GoAstroMo spoke with @NorthwesternU postdoctoral researcher Dr. Aneesh Baburaj about his recent work on the object, including its clouds, atmospheric composition, and the long-standing question of what GJ 504 b actually is. The object has even picked up a colorful nickname along the way: the “pink planet.” But as he explained, even that description comes with a caveat. Learn more: https://t.co/8IQyALepiw
- Aug 14, 20263.0x their median
Over the last three decades, astronomers have discovered the majority of exoplanets indirectly, by observing planets transit their stars or measuring the tiny gravitational pull they exert. Those techniques have revealed thousands of worlds, but actually taking a picture of one remains a challenge. That challenge was the focus of a recent SETI Live conversation, where host @AllPlanets spoke with SETI Institute senior scientist Dr. Margaret Turnbull about NASA's upcoming @NASARoman mission and the revolutionary coronagraph instrument she helps lead. Throughout the conversation, Dr. Turnbull returned to one central idea: Roman is not only another exoplanet mission or great observatory. That coronagraph instrument is a technology demonstration designed to prove that the next generation of telescopes will be able to directly image worlds much more like our own. Learn more: https://t.co/GHHtdlMwPg
- Aug 14, 20262.8x their median
#PPOD: JWST Opens a Treasure Chest 🪙 This @NASAWebb image peers into the Treasure Chest, a glowing cluster of young stars hidden inside the Carina Nebula, about 7,500 light-years from Earth. JWST's infrared vision reveals dozens of newborn stars still wrapped in dust, while powerful radiation from nearby massive stars sculpts the surrounding gas into the shape of an open chest. Credit: @ESA / Webb, @NASA & @csa_asc, M. Reiter; Acknowledgments: M. H. Özsaraç #astronomy
- Aug 7, 20262.6x their median
#PPOD: Milky Way's Bulge 🌀 The largest and most detailed photo ever made of our #MilkyWay galaxy’s center in visible light is revealed in this cutout image from @ESA_Euclid. Packed with more than 60 million stars, this image opens the door for scientists to confirm the existence of any exoplanet found in this region and measure its mass using tiny changes in starlight over time. Credit: @ESA / Euclid/Euclid Consortium / @NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay) #astronomy
- Aug 6, 20262.5x their median
#PPOD: Unmasking an Unusual Asteroid 🥔 These images depict different angles of a very peculiar #asteroid named (44) Nysa. Asteroids are leftovers from the formation of the planets in the Solar System, with most found in a circular belt between Mars and Jupiter. These rocky bodies come in various shapes and sizes, but new images of (44) Nysa, located at the inner edge of the asteroid belt, reveal an unusual structure unlike any previously observed! To resolve (44) Nysa’s shape, a team of astronomers used the #SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and SHARK-VIS, an instrument by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics on the Large Binocular Telescope in the USA. Both instruments use adaptive optics to correct atmospheric blur and obtain crisp images of this asteroid. The data show that the asteroid is 80 km across and is composed of three distinct blobs, or ‘lobes’, joined by two narrower sections that encircle the asteroid, or ‘necks’. All previous identifications of asteroids with a neck have been interpreted as ‘bilobates’, having just two lobes, but (44) Nysa has a unique ‘trilobate’ structure. The team has two possible explanations for how (44) Nysa got its odd shape. Either the asteroid originates from a single object that was heavily deformed through collisions, or is a composite of three objects that impacted and merged, forming necks at the point of contact. Credit: #ESO / K. Minker et al. #planetaryscience
- Aug 24, 20262.5x their median
#PPOD: Mount Fuji From Orbit 🏔️ Seen from the International @Space_Station, Japan’s #MountFuji rises dramatically from the surrounding landscape. Low-angle sunlight emphasizes the volcano’s remarkably symmetrical cone, carving shadows into gullies along its flanks and into the summit crater and nearby Hoei crater. At 3,776 meters (12,389 feet), Mount Fuji is Japan’s highest peak and one of the planet’s most recognizable volcanoes. Views like this from orbit offer a different perspective on the geologic processes that continually reshape Earth—our own dynamic world and the one against which we compare the landscapes and geology of other planets. Credit: @NASA #planetaryscience
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.
Recurring topics
The most frequent hashtags in the sampled posts. They describe what this account writes about; they are not a performance signal, and the catalog-wide breakdown on the hub shows how little hashtag count moves.
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Reading these numbers
A typical post picks up 43 interactions against 680K followers, an engagement rate of 0.006%. Measured over 51 original posts, its engagement rate beats 27% of 3,809 tracked accounts of a similar size, which puts it in the middle of its size range rather than at either end. Posts are seen about 7.6K times each, and 0.565% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.12% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 1.9 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 63% of days. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Thursday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 51 posts sampled, 61% carry an image or video and 63% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 320 interactions, about 7.4x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #ppod, #setilive, #solareclipse.
- What is The SETI Institute's engagement rate on X?
- The SETI Institute (@SETIInstitute) has an engagement rate of 0.006%, based on the median interactions across 51 original posts from the last 30 days against 680,340 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.006%, The SETI Institute sits above the 10th percentile of the 36,960 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 @SETIInstitute have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 27% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,809 accounts), which puts it in the middle of its size range 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 @SETIInstitute post?
- Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Thursday is its busiest day, at roughly 1.93 posts per day across the measured window.