1. A method comprising: storing, in a social networking system, associations between a plurality of users and a plurality of objects maintained by the social networking system; identifying a target object maintained by the social networking system; identifying a set of users associated with the target object from the stored associations, the set of users comprising a plurality of users; determining a set of affinities for the set of users, the set of affinities comprising an affinity for each of the plurality of users for the target object; generating an influence metric associated with the target object based on the set of affinities by applying a weight to each of the set of affinities to generate weighted affinities and by determining a mean of the weighted affinities, the influence metric representing a relevance of the target object to the set of users as a whole; and storing the influence metric.