Abstract: A social networking system allows users to establish connections with other users to receive content provided to the social networking system by the other user. The social networking system may recommend an additional user to the user in response to the user establishing a connection with a target user. To recommend an additional user, the social networking system determines a relevance of the additional user to the target user relative to the relevance of other candidate users to the target user. The relevance may be based on a measure of similarity between an additional user and the target user, such as a covariance in the overlap of users connected to both the additional user and to the target user.