If Login Data Is Gold, Social Login Data Is Platinum

#ICYMI, cookies are on their way out. As far as tracking our user actions across the Internet, our digital diet has long been restricted by the cookies inability to follow users across platforms, devices and app to browser interactions making the cookie obsolete.

Plus, cookies can often cross the line when it comes to user privacy.

In the cookies place is login data, which, with a tail that follows users across multiple devices, is proving to be the golden nugget in understanding users, growing the most valuable audience segments and improving customer experience.

Not having a login for your users, then, is a digital sin, to say the least. But before you rush off to build out a login database for your own site, be forewarned: individual site login data isnt your best option. Read that again on-site login data hosted solely by an individual web property has little value, if only because you are missing out of some 25,000 data points available via a social login.

In the current digital age where social reigns, there is simply no gain digging out your own gold fleck amongst the gold mines that are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and so on. Instead, youre better off joining your forces via social login.

A few years ago, when Facebook first began allowing social login to other sites, brands were wary. At the time, most sites, especially media and e-commerce sites, were building user databases all their own. These databases housed the emails, addresses and phone numbers of your most loyal customers and consumers the ones who let go of their identity data to a site they trusted.

Facebook login brought with it a slew of questions: How would social login data change that site/consumer relationship? How would it affect that trust? And perhaps most importantly, what data would brands be giving up to Facebook in order to implement that small, blue login button?

Fast forward to our current digital landscape and most sites offer at least one social login option. If you arent one of those sites, youre losing out on valuable data, and letting your customer down, too.

Social Login and Customer Perception

In 2013, 90% of Internet users encountered a social login and more than half of those people wound up using one. Facebook was the preferred social login for most (with 45% of the vote), followed by Google+ (35%), Twitter (6%) and LinkedIn (2%).

Industry-wise, 76% of people who shop online use social login, 59% do so when booking travel and 63% use social login when browsing sites on mobile.

Taking this popularity into account, what is the benefit of using social logins? A one-and-done login that is seamless and, ultimately, insanely easy. But to maintain a high level of trust with those who hand over their social identity data, users expect to see an opt-out option.

Personalization via the sites you love (think breaking news emails, sale announcements and newsletters that alert you to cheaper flights back home) is great but no one wants a benefit that comes at the expense of personal privacy.

Facebook, the leading social login site, gives websites the opportunity to select the data points that they want to gain from users who login via the social media network. Those data points are then shown to the user before they sign over that information. If a user declines, an opt-out option is the only way to maintain a high level of trust.

Essentially, users need to have options ones that cater to convenience and others to personal privacy.

The Brand Benefit

Unless you have a unique user set numbering in the multi-millions, social login data will benefit your monetization initiatives, marketing and customer experience initiatives.

“Social login data helps solve the challenge of how to collect more accurate customer profile data without sacrificing customer acquisition rates,” says Michael Olsen, product marketing manager at Janrain. “Social login accelerates the registration process to a single click and gives you instant permission-based access to rich demographic and psychographic data about your customers.

This social profile data can be utilized to improve your segmentation, personalization and targeting efforts.”

The only issue, then, is in the implementation, which can take months to get through your development roadmap and gather the data you need to take action on the insights you want. Thanks to smart data platforms, though, the solution is easier than you think.

These smart data platforms can give you the power to create customizable micro-sites, giving you the unique ability to gain social identity data via social login basically overnight. You don’t need a tech team to implement this. You don’t have to wait months to integrate social login on your site. All you need is a contest, a newsletter, a call to action to get your users to sign up, login in and help you make their online experience that much better.

Logins are the key to personalized audience experience and social login is how you make it happen quickly enough to keep up with your competitors and affect the bottom line next quarter.