An Empirical Study of User Behaviors on Pinterest Social Network

Many previous research works have focused on analyzing online social networks in many dimensions, as they bring large commercial value and provide significant references for many other subjects. Pinterest, a pinboard-style image sharing social service, has attracted much attention recently and become one of the most popular social networks. The special mechanism and style of Pinterest distinguish it from other previous popular social networks and shape totally different user behaviors, which makes it worth launching a new study on Pinterest. In this paper, we have an empirical study of user behaviors on Pinterest, based on a large Pinterest dataset containing 1.13 million users, 57 million following relations, 19 million boards and 933 million pins. We focus on studying the characteristics, manifestations and overall effects of user behaviors from many aspects, including the user interests, correlations between neighboring users, the common features of the most popular users, the topology of the network structure, etc. The most distinguishing characteristic of Pinterest is that users focus on everyday lives and are willing to collect many images about decoration, food, fashion, etc, which makes Pinterest an ideal advertising and marketing platform for retail companies. Many other qualitative and quantitative analysis on user behaviors have been discussed in our paper. We provide a comprehensive understanding of user behaviors on the Pinterest social network, which is our main contribution.