1. A method comprising: receiving, from a requesting user of the social networking system, a request for content from the social networking system; accessing, for each object of a plurality of objects within a social networking system, an influence metric, the influence metric generated based on an associated set of affinities between a set of users associated with the object, each affinity representing an affinity for a user of the set of users for the object, the influence metric representing a relevance of the object to the set of users as a whole; identifying, by the social networking system, a set of candidate objects from the plurality of objects; selecting, by the social networking system, one or more of the identified set of candidate objects based on the accessed influence metrics associated with the set of candidate objects; and configuring, by the social networking system, a display to include the selected one or more candidate objects for presentation to the user.