Kudos make you run! How runners influence each other on the online social network Strava

Strava is the largest online social network for athletes. We used Strava’s big data to investigate how runners in the same virtual Strava club influenced each other’s running behavior. We hypothesized that receiving kudos on recorded activities would spur exercise rates, and that the running behavior of clubmates to whom ego gave kudos would serve as a motivational example. We focused on five different Strava clubs that functioned as a virtual extension of real-life Dutch running clubs with a total of 329 members. Using data on kudos and recorded activities, we constructed a longitudinal dataset of complete networks and behavior over 11 periods with a one-month time window. We tested our hypotheses using SIENA. We found that receiving kudos induced runners to run more and more often. Moreover, athletes tended to adjust their running behavior to that of their ‘kudos-friends’ (i.e., those to whom they gave kudos). Contrary to our expectation, kudos-friends who ran more and more often than ego were not the most influential. If anything, the reverse was true; athletes were more likely to come to resemble the running behavior of their kudos-friends who ran less and less often.