The "Expression Gap": Do You Like What You Share?

While recommendation profiles increasingly leverage social actions such as "shares", the predictive significance of such actions is unclear. To what extent do public shares correlate with other online behaviors such as searches, views and purchases? Based on an analysis of 950,000 users' behavioral, transactional, and social sharing data on a global online commerce platform, we show that social "shares", or publicly posted expressions of interest do not correlate with non-public behaviors such as views and purchases. A key takeaway is that there is a "gap" between public and non-public actions online, suggesting that marketers and advertisers need to be cautious in their estimation of the significance of social sharing.