Michael Shermer engagement report
@michaelshermer - 251K followers on X
Measured over 68 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 26, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 84 interactions against 251K followers, an engagement rate of 0.034%. Measured over 68 original posts, its engagement rate beats 42% of 15,519 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 8.1K times each, and 1.05% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 3.21% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 3.8 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 73% of days. Most posts go out around 14:00 UTC, and Tuesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 68 posts sampled, 50% carry an image or video and 51% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 51K interactions, about 611x its own typical post.
Measured over 68 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 26, 2026.
Compared with accounts its own size
Michael Shermer's engagement rate beats 42% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (15,519 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 46% 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 0.034%, Michael Shermer sits above the 25th percentile of the 157,752 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the below the median band, which runs 0.022% to 0.128%.
Show the percentile table
| Percentile | Engagement rate |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 0.003% |
| 25th percentile | 0.022% |
| 50th percentile | 0.128% |
| 75th percentile | 0.604% |
| 90th percentile | 2.32% |
| 99th percentile | 83.4% |
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 14:00 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% | 89K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 90K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 88K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 94K |
| 04:00 UTC | -5% | 76K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 75K |
| 06:00 UTC | -5% | 86K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 93K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 108K |
| 09:00 UTC | -4% | 124K |
| 10:00 UTC | -3% | 129K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 141K |
| 12:00 UTC | -3% | 154K |
| 13:00 UTC | -3% | 167K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 173K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 176K |
| 16:00 UTC | -3% | 171K |
| 17:00 UTC | -3% | 159K |
| 18:00 UTC | -2% | 149K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 141K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 131K |
| 21:00 UTC | 0% | 116K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 100K |
| 23:00 UTC | -1% | 90K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +5% | 393K |
| Monday | +1% | 483K |
| Tuesday | -2% | 520K |
| Wednesday | -3% | 472K |
| Thursday | -2% | 430K |
| Friday | -3% | 447K |
| Saturday | +2% | 393K |
Formats this account uses
Its own posting mix on the left, and what each of those formats does across every account we track on the right. Only formats where the effect clears our publish test appear here, so an empty row is a format we could not measure rather than one that does nothing.
| Format | This account | Catalog effect | 95% interval | Accounts behind it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image or video | 50% of posts | +111% | +108% to +115% | 34K |
| Outbound link | 51% of posts | -41% | -42% to -40% | 32K |
| Typical length | - | +15% | +14% to +16% | 32K |
- 50% of this account's sampled posts carry an image or video. Across the catalog, posts with an image or video run 111% above the same accounts' other posts.
- 51% of its posts carry a link off X. Across the catalog, posts with an outbound link run 41% below the same accounts' other posts, so a large share of this account's output sits in the weakest bucket we measure.
- Its average post runs 417 characters, which falls in the over 280 characters band. Across the catalog, posts over 280 characters run 15% above the same accounts' other posts.
These are catalog-wide differences applied to this account's own posting mix, not a measurement of how each format performs for this account specifically. We keep one median per account, not one per format per account, so the second thing is not something this data can tell you.
Best tweets
- Sep 1, 2026611x their median
When Dolly Parton approached Robert Plant for permission to record her version of “Stairway to Heaven,” she reportedly worried about how he would react. Instead, Plant’s response was wonderfully simple: “Of course you can, you’re Dolly Parton.” And somehow, that feels like the perfect answer. Dolly didn’t try to copy Led Zeppelin — she took one of rock’s most iconic songs and made it unmistakably her own, adding a touch of country, gospel, and her unmistakable voice. Sometimes, a legend recognizing another legend is all the permission you need.
- Sep 6, 202622x their median
🚨 At Socialism 2026’s “Liberatory Spirit, the Spirit of Liberation” panel, Rev. Jinzu Minna Jain warns that even left-wing spaces can accidentally reproduce “health fascism” through the language of healing. She says organizers need to be careful about what “healing” means, because sometimes people are not looking to “get better” or “move past” trauma at all. Instead, she argues, what people may need is collective support while “sitting with the cracks,” “sitting with the bones,” and “sitting in the horror together.” I’m not especially sold on the whole “Woke 1.0 vs. Woke 2.0” framework, but if even “healing” can now be ideologically objectionable, then we have entered some truly rarefied territory.
- Sep 13, 202618x their median
So many people on the timeline can't entertain the theory that the simplest explanation for a lot of the behavior of the leaders is that they earnestly believe AI is an existential threat. Maybe it's hard to imagine if you personally would not say earnest things when in power?
- Sep 21, 202612x their median
Kudos to Nikole Hannah-Jones for admitting it was a mistake to send her daughter to a poor black segregated failing school so she could run her own social justice experiment & write articles about it, but it took her kid to explain the job of a parent: “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” Thanks mom! Keep pumping out those articles at my expense! Wokeness poisons everything. https://t.co/ZM2oLtWJp4
- Sep 7, 202612x their median
You simply cannot parody these people faster than they can parody themselves https://t.co/wrusjk67GJ
- Sep 3, 20269.5x their median
Breaking news from the frontiers of physics and cosmology… https://t.co/uj0B57GUsP
- Sep 19, 20268.9x their median
LOL. According to Anthropic... Our product could spell the end of humanity, total extinction of the species, the end of civilization...but we're looking forward to the billions of dollars in our upcoming IPO in case you want to get in on it! https://t.co/6b3AAZN99f
- Sep 16, 20268.0x their median
"Sydney Sweeney set women's sports back 20 years" Uh...how did she do that again? https://t.co/vvAPwPvOhO
- Sep 13, 20267.1x their median
And don't forget what almost everyone said would happen when 1999 became 2000: Y2K (computers would misinterpret the year "00" as 1900) Planes would fall out of the sky and air traffic control centers would cease. Power grids and municipal water systems would shut down. Banking, Wall Street, and the economy would collapse. Hospital medical systems would stop. Software controlling nuclear weapons would glitch us into a nuclear war. Society would collapse. What did the doomsters say when none of this happened? Either: "Our warnings were headed so we saved civilization" or "climate change is going to kill us all" It never ends.
- Sep 18, 20267.1x their median
Bret Weinstein responds to Michael Shermer in the episode "Just Asking Questions" on DarkHorse. "There should be no bar to just asking questions. Just asking questions is the normal behavior. And the fact that something out there would like to stigmatize it is conspicuous in and of itself."
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 84 interactions against 251K followers, an engagement rate of 0.034%. Measured over 68 original posts, its engagement rate beats 42% of 15,519 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 8.1K times each, and 1.05% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 3.21% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 3.8 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 73% of days. Most posts go out around 14:00 UTC, and Tuesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 68 posts sampled, 50% carry an image or video and 51% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 51K interactions, about 611x its own typical post.
- What is Michael Shermer's engagement rate on X?
- Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) has an engagement rate of 0.034%, based on the median interactions across 68 original posts from the last 30 days against 251,316 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.034%, Michael Shermer sits above the 25th percentile of the 157,752 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 @michaelshermer have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 42% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (15,519 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 @michaelshermer post?
- Most posts go out around 14:00 UTC, and Tuesday is its busiest day, at roughly 3.83 posts per day across the measured window.