Pinpointing inuence in pinterest

The success of most applications that run on top of a social network infrastructure is due to the social ties among their users; the users can get informed about the activity of their friends and acquain-tances, and, hence, new ideas, habits, and products have the opportunity to gain popularity. Therefore, understanding the inuence dynamics on social networks provides us with insights that are useful in designing ef--cient social network applications. In this work we focus on Pinterest, a social network that is often used to promote commercial products, and investigate the inuence mechanisms in it. We examine the user inde-gree and PageRank as potential estimators of the number of repins and likes the user may receive. We observe that, although both measures are weakly associated with user inuence in Pinterest, PageRank is much more powerful than indegree in revealing how much inuential a user is.