What marketers need to know about the brewing social login battle
Facebook, Twitter and Google are jockeying for dominance in social logins, which has implications for audience insights and for targeting social ad campaigns.
Social logins can be an important tool for mobile marketers, but few creative uses exist, such as KLM?s Meet and Seat. Building trust with consumers is key to using social logins effectively but with offerings from Google, Twitter and Facebook continuing to evolve as they look to gain dominance here, this could give pause to those who are already not sure about how to proceed.
?Marketers should take a keen interest on the social login battleground,? said Amy Gale, associate planning director at Isobar US.
?The current vying for dominance in social logins is of benefit to brands - assuming one company succeeds,? she said. ?A monopoly within social login formats works in a marketers favor.
?One source of social login data provides marketing teams with a more holistic view of their audience, which is inherently more actionable.?
Anonymous logins
While a dominant social login could benefit marketers, if anonymous logins ? which the social media players are moving towards - gain steam, this could cause problems for marketers, per Ms. Gale.
This is because marketers will need to decide if lowering the barrier to sign on via a social login is valuable even without the data that comes with it.
?Today, social logins give immediate access to incredibly useful data from demographic insight though to behaviors and preferences,? Ms. Gale said. ?These insights can otherwise be difficult to get with data-capture forms.
?That said, social login data is not a substitute; marketers should always strive to capture and own their user data,? she said. ?The shift towards anonymous logins is a warning signs to brands that a social login is only a short-term solution.?
Target's Cartwheel site uses social logins
Evolving landscape
A lot of apps and Web sites currently require a social login for users to access all of the services. A good example is Target?s Cartwheel, which encourages users to sign in via Facebook or Google + in order to best take advantage of the opportunities to receive personalized offers.
Most online consumers choosing to login to third-party sites and applications currently use Facebook. Google is in second place with all other players trailing significantly behind.
However, the landscape is evolving.
With privacy a growing concern for consumers, Facebook this year introduced a number of changes to its login offering, enabling consumers to control how much, if any, information they want to share.
More recently, Twitter initiated a bid to play a meaningful role in logins with Digits, which relies on a user?s mobile phone number to enable the login. For example, to create a new online account for an app, a user would submit a mobile phone number and receive a text message with a code that can be entered for access to the service or app.
Twitter is in the process of encouraging app developers to build this option into their apps.
?Twitter is an interesting challenger to the social login market where Facebook and Google currently dominate,? Ms. Gale said. ?The fabric of Twitter?s network is quintessentially ?open? in comparison to Facebook and Gmail.
?This in itself might make consumers more relaxed about having their Twitter interests and actions being used by other brands,? she said. ?However, it?s a big ask.
?Twitter is starting from a much smaller base in this sphere and they have other challenges that are more pertinent such as trying to build a broader and mainstream consumer proposition first.?
Removing social logins
These changes could be why some marketers are finding that social logins do not work for them.
For example, shopping app Modcloth recently removed Facebook login from its iPhone app, explaining to users that it was not working for customers.
The key benefit for marketers of social logins is that this enables them to access information about users that they have provided to the social platform supporting the login.
Social logins can also help marketers create lookalike audiences that match their existing users for ad targeting purposes.
?Social logins are becoming increasingly important for marketers that are utilizing social advertising,? said Jay Hawkinson, senior vice president of emerging products for SIM Partners.
?Users that login through their preferred social platform can be later placed in a custom audience for ad targeting,? he said. ?This is powerful for marketers to aim ad content at people that are already using a specific mobile app or Web site or to create lookalike audiences that match those visitors.?
Other common uses of social logins are social proof and advocacy of site content which come in features such as ?friends who like this brand? or ?find friends? and ?post to network,? per Isobar?s Ms. Gale.
Getting creative
More creative uses of social logins are sparse.
One such example is KLM?s Meet and Seat, which enables passengers to view other passengers Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn profile details and see where they will be sitting before a flight takes off.
?The best uses of social logins are where social really improves the user experience, for example sites such as Pinterest and Spotify greatly benefit from simple ?find friends? features where as this could be pretty a big stretch for an commerce site if its not integral to a user journey,? Ms. Gale said.
To better leverage social logins, marketers need to think about the ways they can connect to this audience in the social channels with both organic and paid content, per SIM Partners? Mr. Hawkinson.
?More marketers could be leveraging social logins especially as social advertising becomes increasingly important,? Mr. Hawkinson said. ?Most of the best-in-class examples are event or application-driven platforms.
?Fandango has been doing it for a while for online movie ticket ordering,? he said. ?It's a good use case for making a simple transaction more accessible with social logins.?
Final Take
Chantal Tode is senior editor on Mobile Marketer, New York