The Importance of Social Login

The following post details why social login is important and explains its impact on websites and applications. The premise is fairly straightforward and it increases user engagement while also improving user experience on your site.

Some immediately visible advantages:

• Simple. Easy. Fast.
• Permission-based contact details like email address can be pulled in from social providers.
• Most people only have one social profile on each network, making the retrievable data more authentic.

Firstly, social login greatly reduces the need for passwords or usernames. This, in a very straightforward manner, reduces friction when users are onboarding or returning to your website. It accelerates the signup and sign in processes by reducing them to as little as one or two clicks, without any typing in most cases. Thus, social login makes your website easier to use and onboard. Furthermore, it removes “password fatigue”. Password fatigue refers to when users tire from their need to remember, re-create, and write down passwords and usernames. When they tire out, they leave the site before signing in or signing up because they are “tired out”. Thus, social login helps you retain your users by removing this obstruction.

Secondly, targeting users with content that is more appropriate to them becomes easier due to access to more authentic data when employing social login. When you use social login, you get the basic data from the platform the user has logged in with, therefore, you have the opportunity to access the necessary data without having to ask for it. In turn, this allows you to improve how users experience your site by targeting them with more appropriate content and suggested actions.

A little more depth on data accessibility and why it is important:

Social Login is a permission-based user data collection method. When users log into a site using one of their social IDs and consent to sharing their data, they allow marketers to view information that they have actively chosen to share. This makes their information more likely to be accurate. Their data can contain hundreds of possible data points and marketers can use these data points to better identify their user-base, what a potential user might care about most, etc. This is the most beneficial aspect of using social login from a business point of view.

Other thoughts:

Another interesting advantage is that users often spend more time on your website when they login via social login. This first came to light when Facebook began releasing statistics that showed that users who logged in to websites via Facebook’s social login spent more time on those sites. The thinking behind this is fairly simple: users bring their identity onto the platform they are joining, which in turn makes them more likely to engage with the website since they are bringing their social graph with them on to their site.

Last, but not least:

Social login meets expectations from users. Users are starting to see and experience social login across more and more platforms. As users experience the benefits with more and more websites and apps, they are beginning to expect social login as a feature. Having social login shows you care about your users’ experience, furthermore, users don’t just want social logins these days, they expect it.

What are your thoughts or experiences with social logins? Considering adding social logins to your site or app? Drop us a line – team@oauth.io – or write to us on our live chat 🙂