Total Followers 132,503
Would you like more people to create a user account on your website? Anyone with a website that encourages website traffic to create an account always wants more subscribers. The challenge is two-fold. Most people don’t like giving up personal data to websites unless they are comfortable with them or really need what the site is offering. Reason number two, the registration process is usually time-consuming. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a solution to both of these issues? You’d think that if you can solve the two biggest hurdles to people creating an account on your website that you’d be able to increase your conversion rate of website traffic to website subscribers. The solution is out there… It’s called Social Login, and in this article we are going to dig into what it is, how you can use it on your website, the benefits of doing so, and provide a few examples of sites who are using Social Login successfully.
Social Login options
Social Login is the process of letting users create accounts on your site by logging into their social media accounts. Using API calls back-end software will connect to the user’s social media account and pull in all relevant data required for your sites Registration Process. If any additional data is required by your site, but was not collected from the user’s social media account, you can display those fields, ask users to complete the form, and click a Register/Submit button. Basically this allows users to bypass a normal website registration process, simply login to their social media account, and click Register (unless extra data is required). Social Login is much less time-consuming than normal website registration process.
Different websites allow users to use different social media accounts to register. The key to selecting the right social media tools to use on your website starts with analyzing your target audience. What social media channels do you think most of your website traffic uses? Either that, or just go with the two biggest social media channels, Twitter and Facebook!
In order to integrate Social Login into your website you must find Social Login software to use. Here are a few that you can choose from:
Social Login Janrain
Social Login is a great tool for increasing the number of subscribers to your website. That said, in most cases, it shouldn’t be the only registration option. Some people don’t want to merge their social profiles with other websites. You want to give potential users the option of logging in without social media. Some people either don’t have social media accounts on the sites that you provide as Social Login options or they don’t want to see things that they do on your website show up on their Social Media accounts. Although there are a lot of benefits of adding a Social Login option to your website, it should be an added option, not the only option.
Adding Social Login to your website can be an extremely beneficial use of your time and/or money. Here are a few of the numerous benefits that Social Login offers website owners:
Is Social Login Safe?
The simple answer is YES. The long answer is slightly more complicated. Social Login is typically very safe with regards to your personal data getting into the wrong hands. That said, using Social Login to sign-up for a website simply opens a user up to yet another API call that’s transferring personal data between his social network and your website. There’s always a little risk that something will happen that will either cause the API call to break and data to be leaked or for someone tapping into it and stealing data. All of this being said, there’s also safety concerns for any type of registration process whereby consumers provide their personal data to a company/website. Social Login is typically extremely safe, but it does open consumers up to just another avenue for their personal data to fall into the wrong hands. In my opinion the risk is pretty low.
There are hundreds of thousands to millions of websites around the web that use Social Login. Here are a few examples of websites who successfully use Social Login:
Pinterest currently allows users to login with either their Facebook or Twitter account. It will be interesting to see if they switch that to Facebook-only moving forward.
Social Login Pinterest
HubSpot, an online marketing software company with a very large user base, allows users to login to Hubspot with their Google Account.
Social Login HubSpot
iVillage.com provides the most flexible of all of the sites that we are going to review in this article. They offer a standard registration process whereby they collect Email, Username, and Password. iVillage.com also lets users register and login via Social Login. Users can choose from a variety of social networks to connect to their iVillage.com account, from Facebook and Twitter to Yahoo! and AOL.
Social Login iVillage.com
ESPN.com provides users with both a standard registration process and Social Login registration process in order to create an account on ESPN.com. ESPN have decided that most of their website traffic is on Facebook, thus they have gone with the Facebook Connect Social Login option.
Social Login ESPN.com
Will you add Social Login to your website? Depending on your needs, integrating Social Login into your website will either be pretty quick and easy (think WordPress plugin), or a little more time-consuming and/or expensive. That said, no matter how the integration process plays out for you, one thing is pretty clear, your users will appreciate it and more people will sign-up for an account on your website. Let us know if you are currently using Social Login and what you think about it by leaving a comment below. If you aren’t currently using Social Login, do you think you’ll look into integrating it into your website?
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Ryan Taft is a twenty-something entrepreneur with a passion for helping small businesses use online marketing tools to reach more customers and prospects, build relationships with those folks, and ultimately grow sales.
Thursday, April 26th, 2012 03:23
Nice overview. I think I’m going to give that Social Login plugin for WordPress as try. On a sidenote: I’m not sure where you got the information, but Facebook did not purchase Pinterest. (They bought Instagram instead.)
Thursday, April 26th, 2012 04:37
Aye, you are correct Stijn! Perhaps what Ryan was thinking was Facebook might have bought Instagram to compete with Pinterest? It just didn’t get out right. :)
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 23:40
Social login is really a great advantage for any website since it mainly reduce the hassles of registration and confirmation of email accounts, user database management and thinks like that, a lot of options are available these days to integrate these into our websites, for PHP developers, i came across one good open source library to integrate social media login into your site called HybridAuth, Open Source Social Sign On PHP Library, it was worth trying, i also implemented for one of my clients, it is really good..
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rajasegar
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 23:40
Social login is really a great advantage for any website since it mainly reduce the hassles of registration and confirmation of email accounts, user database management and thinks like that, a lot of options are available these days to integrate these into our websites, for PHP developers, i came across one good open source library to integrate social media login into your site called HybridAuth, Open Source Social Sign On PHP Library, it was worth trying, i also implemented for one of my clients, it is really good..
Stijn
Thursday, April 26th, 2012 03:23
Nice overview. I think I’m going to give that Social Login plugin for WordPress as try. On a sidenote: I’m not sure where you got the information, but Facebook did not purchase Pinterest. (They bought Instagram instead.)
Rean John Uehara
Thursday, April 26th, 2012 04:37
Aye, you are correct Stijn! Perhaps what Ryan was thinking was Facebook might have bought Instagram to compete with Pinterest? It just didn’t get out right. :)