Should You Enable Social Login with Your Web Products?

With the world racing to chase time and expecting long and lengthy processes to metamorphose into a one click task, a lot has become redundant in just a matter of a few years. The technology shift is close to 100% and the digital economy is growing at an unprecedented rate. As per the World Economic Forum, 60% of global GDP will be digitized by 2022. This consolidates the fact that the only way for businesses to survive in the future is by adapting and delivering services as per the ever-evolving digitization. 

Digitization has many aspects. It can start right from the availability of an online imprint to empowering the users enough so that they can complete an entire transaction with a single tap on their mobile screen. In this blog, we will discuss one such digital functionality - Social Login; its acceptance, concerns and benefits worldwide, so as to help organizations with public sites in better decision making, as to whether they should consider introducing social login or not.

What is Social login?

It is the single sign-on ability of the users. Using their social accounts like Google, Facebook or Twitter, they can authenticate and register themselves on your website or application. This is a quicker way of enabling the user to log on to your site, rather than asking them to fill out an entire form.  Apart from being time saving there are other benefits of enabling social login that are described further.

Some Key Benefits of Social Login

1. Enhanced User Experience
   Apart from saving time, social login brings along the biggest advantage of enhancing user experience. Enabling the user to login using one single user ID eliminates the need to handle multiple ids and passwords. It removes the unnecessary need to keep recovering forgotten passwords and drastically reduces the login failure attempts. The smoother ability to login and access your website enhances the overall user experience, reduces bounce rate and improves website ranking on search engines and increases the user logins. A survey by Blue Research reveals that around 1/3rd of people leave the website with the need to recover forgotten passwords.
   Moreover, the integration with social sites for authentication is easily doable which provides a reliable alternative to an active directory or SSO type architecture e.g., Google login integration. About  86% of the users are least interested in creating new accounts for different websites, suggests Gigya’s research.
2. Quicker Information Sharing
   It enables  faster registration with easy cross reference and social sharing of information. This particularly plays a major role in Ecommerce sites. It greatly reduces the shopping cart abandonment on the checkout page and is regarded as one of the best strategies to optimize checkout. 
   There is no need for additional lengthy forms for inputting the details, which can be easily found with mostly these social login platforms. E.g. personal info like name, email address, gender, interests, profile picture etc. The research by Gigya also suggests that 77% of the people surveyed believe that social logins are a good option to have.
3. Better Access to User Profile

   We have seen that these social platforms already provide us with information around a user’s interests, demography, etc. Additionally, some analytics can easily be put around and used to present a more contextual and personalized content experience to the website or platform users having such integration in place. 

An interesting study from Gigya tells us why Social login is getting more popular

While there are several debates around data privacy on these social media accounts, an overwhelming population still prefers convenience over privacy. Out of the 2000 consumers surveyed, about 88% preferred using their social logins. Each year this number is increasing substantially. But the survey also found that about 96% of the respondents can be classified under two categories, about 46% are somewhat concerned about their privacy and about 50% are very much concerned about their data privacy. So this safely concludes that consumers are willing to share details if the service in exchange is worth it. 

Some of the key takeaways from the Digital 2020 Global digital overview are:

1. More than 4.5 billion people are using the internet at the start of 2020.
2. Active social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark with this number increasing by more than 9 percent (321 million new users) since this time last year.
   1. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online and trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year.
   2. More social media users might indicate that more acceptance of social features like login is among the users.
3. Analyzing Traffic distribution

Even google analytics can help in analyzing the rise in traffic through social channels over a period of time. As an example below from a client’s undisclosed site, it is clearly seen that traffic coming from social sites is quite high.

Key Concerns or Barriers:

While it brings along several benefits, there are some barriers that need to be taken care of, some of these are mentioned below:

• Awareness or information about using social logins often tends to drag the users’ interest away and bring in hesitation to explore or use it to the fullest.

• Privacy and data security concerns among users are increasing day-by-day with the increase in attempts related to cybercrime. Thus, one should try and gain all knowledge and information on the correct implementation before implementing. 
• It’s more on the solution architect and security officers of the website being developed, to take appropriate measures and other checks while implementing social logins.

• At the outset do keep an alternate registration option available for the class of users who don't want to use Social Login at all.

So, overall the bringing in Social Login has several benefits that indirectly impact the strategies and business goals. However, this would require a thoughtful assessment considering all the aspects. In need of proper business analysis and the inclusion of social login on your platform, you can talk to our experts for a balanced overview.