Maria Popova engagement report
@themarginalian - 839K followers on X
Measured over 80 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 30, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 68 interactions against 839K followers, an engagement rate of 0.008%. Measured over 80 original posts, its engagement rate beats 31% 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 11K times each, and 0.625% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.30% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 2.7 posts a day over the last 30 days, though only 33% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 21:00 UTC, and Thursday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 80 posts sampled, 100% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 619 interactions, about 9.1x its own typical post.
Measured over 80 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 30, 2026. Recurring tag: #nationaldogday.
Compared with accounts its own size
Maria Popova's engagement rate beats 31% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,809 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 38% 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 0.008%, Maria Popova sits above the 10th percentile of the 36,852 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 21:00 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% | 50K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 54K |
| 04:00 UTC | -6% | 43K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 42K |
| 06:00 UTC | -4% | 48K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 52K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 61K |
| 09:00 UTC | -3% | 70K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 72K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 79K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 87K |
| 13:00 UTC | -3% | 95K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 98K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 101K |
| 16:00 UTC | -4% | 99K |
| 17:00 UTC | -2% | 91K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 85K |
| 19:00 UTC | -1% | 80K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 75K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 66K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 58K |
| 23:00 UTC | -2% | 52K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +4% | 232K |
| Monday | 0% | 290K |
| Tuesday | -2% | 281K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 252K |
| Thursday | -2% | 245K |
| Friday | -3% | 254K |
| Saturday | +3% | 228K |
Best tweets
- Jan 6, 20269.1x their median
Across the abyss between one consciousness and another, between one frame of reference and another, we go on searching for an organizing principle to fathom the ultimate questions: What is life? What is death? What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? Over and over, we discover that it is all one question, that there might just be a single answer: love. Our love of knowledge. Our love of mystery. Our love of beauty transcending the vanity of ambition. Our love of truth prevailing over the howling hunger for power. Our love for each other — each of us a festival of particles and probabilities, a living question, a perishable miracle composed of chemistry and culture, of passion and chance. https://t.co/NQlN6dFG3h
- Aug 27, 20264.9x their median
Your life will thank you for reading Jad Abumrad's tender, thoughtful recollection of Dolly's superpower, her dazzlingly integrated duality https://t.co/nqJtODBp5G
- Aug 28, 20264.0x their median
"Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny." Hermann Hesse on solitude, the value of hardship, and how to find your destiny https://t.co/MWDfIb9fI7
- Aug 27, 20263.7x their median
"1. Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom." 10 rules of writing (which apply to all creative work) from one of the finest writers of our time https://t.co/3jrGv2wAs4
- Aug 21, 20262.8x their median
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on the dignity of neediness and the intelligence of emotions https://t.co/R2ocArfHAF
- Aug 28, 20262.6x their median
The four desires driving all human behavior – Bertrand Russell's magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech https://t.co/VQVUlNwYA8
- Aug 20, 20262.6x their median
Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which you return again and again, and which returns you to your life refreshed each time. https://t.co/QXD23yZbtO
- Aug 21, 20262.3x their median
For an act of resistance to the tyranny of algorithms, try the Marginalian newsletter — undistracted notes on the search for meaning through art, science, philosophy, poetry, and various other tendrils of wonder. For 20 years, it has remained a one-woman labor of love — free, ad-free, AI-free, and fully human: https://t.co/kJdb2Rs2sV
- Aug 20, 20262.2x their median
“What is happiness but growth in peace.” May Sarton's stunning poem about being at home in yourself https://t.co/aUlBdg5moI
- Aug 29, 20262.1x their median
This Is a Poem That Heals Fish – an almost unbearably wonderful French picture-book (but really work of philosophy) about how poetry works its magic https://t.co/sx0fP9aDax
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 68 interactions against 839K followers, an engagement rate of 0.008%. Measured over 80 original posts, its engagement rate beats 31% 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 11K times each, and 0.625% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.30% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 2.7 posts a day over the last 30 days, though only 33% of days saw any activity at all. Most posts go out around 21:00 UTC, and Thursday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 80 posts sampled, 100% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 619 interactions, about 9.1x its own typical post.
- What is Maria Popova's engagement rate on X?
- Maria Popova (@themarginalian) has an engagement rate of 0.008%, based on the median interactions across 80 original posts from the last 30 days against 839,301 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.008%, Maria Popova sits above the 10th percentile of the 36,852 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 @themarginalian have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 31% 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 @themarginalian post?
- Most posts go out around 21:00 UTC, and Thursday is its busiest day, at roughly 2.67 posts per day across the measured window.