Facebook gains ground as dominant social media login
16 July, 2014
category: Digital ID
Password fatigue is leading more Web surfers to log in to various sites using their social network identities. More than half of us are doing it, according to a report by identity management provider Janrain. In the last four years, social login technology has become a popular offering on more web sites.
The Q2 2014 report found that Facebook is gaining ground again as the dominant social login of choice after a steady decline over the last six quarters. During the same period, Google consistently increased its share.
While other social networks remain far behind the top two, LinkedIn commands a nearly 30% share of social logins on B2B sites. Amazon and Instagram IDs have a 10-25% share on sites where they are enabled.
Jamie Beckland, vice president of Marketing and Customer Success at Janrain, says consumers are getting more comfortable with the idea of using their favorite social media login for multiple sites. “They’re starting to understand better the privacy and security benefits, and they also are starting to understand the user experience benefits,” he adds.
It helps that more sites are getting better at explaining how personal data is used. “On the permission screen, they have all been experimenting – especially over the last 18 months – with new ways of disclosing to the user what information is being shared,” Beckland explains.
Facebook, for example, recently started offering line-by-line controls to consumers.“So you have the ability to check or uncheck any particular data point that you want to share with the brand,” Beckland says. “It’s interesting that during the time they made this announcement, Facebook actually started to regain some market share.”
Beckland thinks this may be an early indicator that consumers are more apt to trust sites that enable them to control use of their personal data. “Twitter is interesting because they give up very little data about the user,” Beckland says.
Twitter surpassed Yahoo and became the #3 most popular site for social media logins in Q2. “They have stuck with this idea that they’re going to offer a different kind of data sharing than other identity providers, and – at least in this last quarter – it was helpful for them.”