Why a social login could be the solution for your site

One of the sad truths about people on social networks is that they don’t like to leave those social networks. So getting them to migrate away from beloved Facebook to interact with your site can prove a laborious task.

But if you can manipulate your site to encourage people to create user accounts via their social networks you’re likely to drive a lot more eyeballs.

An easy way to tap into the power of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn is to allow users to quickly and easily create user identities or login profiles using these sites, but you may be wondering why this is so pertinent.

Why social login?

Once people login to their favorite social network, they generally don’t log out. Today the majority of people have a social account with at least one of the major social networks, which means that their profile picture and contact details are already registered. Why not capitalise on this?

To make it super-simple for people to create accounts to use and to access your site, it is probably worth thinking about integrating social login.

Two rather large networks, Pinterest and Klout, both require folks use either Facebook or Twitter to even create an account.

The key benefit is that it allows you to leverage social login so as to bring people into your site quickly and with minimum effort.

In addition making the login process simple as pie, there are some other major advantages:

• Rapid signup/user adoption: Users won’t need to fill out any forms, they’ll simply grant your system access to their existing credentials.
• Photo integration: Social networks allow you to import the photograph of the user into your system immediately.
• Email contact: Many social networks will allow you to pull the contact details from the user (such as an email address), making it very good for ongoing and future communication.
• Spam reduction: Because social networks authenticate individuals and generally don’t allow multiple accounts, the likelihood of false identities and spammers is dramatically decreased.

Things to note before going the full social-login hog

Before rushing into things keep in mind that integrating something like social login is fairly complicated and you will most probably to twist the arm of a developer friend to help you get it up and running.

Setting up access with the various social networks is a bit of a chore so you’ll need to invest a fair bit of time in this, and if you’re a little clueless about the backend of how this stuff works, offer hefty bribes to your developer friend to carry on holding your hand throughout the process.

Social login is more viable for larger websites and businesses, as smaller ones might find the solution to be quite heavy on the pocket. On the up side, once you’ve integrated social login into your site, it can accommodate significant traffic and users without batting an eyelid.

Have a comprehensive database on hand, with up-to-date relevant details, is something very valuable in today’s market. In essence, integrating social login will enable your business to create, manage and keep track of your database as it continues to grow in a real-time, effective way that will not only save you time, but make your communication that much more effective.