Chic or Social

From Flickr to Facebook to Pinterest, pictures are increasingly becoming a core content type in social networks. But, how important is this visual content and how does it influence behavior in the network? In this paper we study the effects of visual, textual, and social factors on popularity in a large real-world network focused on fashion. We make use of state of the art computer vision techniques for clothing representation, as well as network and text information to predict post popularity in both in-network and out-of-network scenarios. Our experiments find significant statistical evidence that social factors dominate the in-network scenario, but that combinations of content and social factors can be helpful for predicting popularity outside of the network. This in depth study of image popularity in social networks suggests that social factors should be carefully considered for research involving social network photos.