Francisco GuzmanJim Liu

June 12, 2013

The Effects of Surfacing Related Interests On Online User Profile

Follows

Research Area: Social Computing

> People form impressions of others !iven surprisin!ly little information.

> With the advent of social networks, impressions now frequently form online rather than in a face-to- face context.

> Interpersonal similarity in personal attributes has been shown to cause positive evaluation of others and likin! toward them.

Does tailoring a user’s profile to the viewer increase likeness1?

1. Operationalized as a follow

Prismatic

Default Sort Interest Sort

Methodology

> Within-subjects study> Each participant sees the same 10 profiles of Prismatic users> 5 of the 10 profiles sorted by default, others use interest sort> Similarity scores were calculated in order to control for similarity

Quantitative Qualitative

make a decision on whether to follow

explain why you:

> followed a particular user

> did not follow a particular user

Results: quantitative

0

7.5

15.0

22.5

30.0

0 1 2 3 4 5 More

Freq

uenc

y

Bin

0

3.75

7.50

11.25

15.00

0 1 2 3 4 5 More

Freq

uenc

y

Bin

Follow Count (Default Sort)

Follow Count (Interest Sort)

N = 52Trials = 520

t-statistic: 2.06E-06

χ2: 21.59p < 0.001

Results: qualitative

Users confirmed that the ali!nment of interests was a bi! factor for them

1. Serendipity

2. Frequency of Use

3. Community around Individual

the mix of relevant articles with an element of surprise

active user and contributor

who and what they follow, as well as who follows them

Conclusion

Overall our results were quite tellin! with almost twice as many follows for the sorted interest case versus the default case.

> Both of these results seem to support the notion that surfacin! more interpersonal similarities between users leads to hi!her level of closeness throu!h follows or likes in an online settin!.

Quantitative Qualitative

Appendix

DefaultDefault InterestInterest

Follow No Follow Follow No Follow

Sum 62 198 112 148

Mean 12.4 39.6 22.4 29.6

STDV 7.12 7.13 6.02 6.02