Profile Popularity in a Business-oriented Online Social Network

TL;DR

This study investigates factors influencing profile popularity in a business-oriented online social network by analyzing user data over three months, revealing that contact acceptance and updating habits significantly affect profile impression frequency.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into the key profile features that correlate with popularity, challenging assumptions about activity and user demographics.

Findings

Number of accepted contacts correlates with profile impressions.

Frequent contact updates increase profile visibility.

Overall activity and gender have minimal impact on popularity.

Abstract

Analysing Online Social Networks (OSN), voluntarily maintained and automatically exploitable databases of electronic personal information, promises a wealth of insight into their users' behavior, interest, and utilization of these currently predominant services on the Internet. To understand popularity in OSN, we monitored a large sample of profiles from a highly popular network for three months, and analysed the relation between profile properties and their impression frequency. Evaluating the data indicates a strong relation between both the number of accepted contacts and the diligence of updating contacts versus the frequency of requests for a profile. Counter intuitively, the overall activity, gender, as well as participation span of users have no remarkable impact on their profile's popularity.