Best practices to create genuine customer identities with Social Login

Poor customer data is the surefire way to deplete business resources as well as time. Data experts are well aware of the fact that poor data damages efficiency of business and as per research, it can even cost businesses 20-30% loss in revenue.

Many blog posts have been written in the past about how third party data strategies are being replaced by more informative and more accurate first party customer data but learning how to actually gather and leverage this first party data is also equally important.

Social Login is a great way to get better customer insights. It provides first party user profile data to businesses when users sign in using one of their social media accounts. Here are some best practices to access this permission based first party user data with the help of social media login :

• Provide them a reason to register :
  
  If you want customers to share their personal information with you, then the first thing that you need to do is to give them a clear reason on why should they register. Without some additional benefits no one would bother to register and share his/her personal social profile details.
  
  
  
  
  Tripadvisor.com does a great job here by clearly displaying the benefits of registration. By creating account here with their preferred social media account, users can easily take advice from their social media friends and also share their own experiences.  By providing users the reason why they should share their social identity, businesses can boost more sign ups which means more first party data.
  
• Offer multiple login choices :
  
  Though we all know Facebook remains of the top when it comes to social login preferences (Source), we must not forget that there are other social media networks too on which users are active. Don’t limit your sign up rates by offering just one choice of login as we all know not all the customers can be on the same network. Choice is the king and that’s why you should offer at least three major social media networks ie Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for signing in to the website.
  
  Also make sure to give the option of traditional registration for those who are not on any of the social media network.

         Huffington Post, the popular online news aggregator and blog, provides its audience the     
         choice between the four major social media networks as per their audience preferences.
         Apart from this, it has also provided users the choice of traditional registration.

• Don’t ask for all the information at once :
  
  Asking for all the information at once overwhelms user and they might abandon the registration process. To that end, finding the appropriate time to ask for more user information is important in order to get authentic user data.
  
  So instead of asking all the information at once, first let users login to your website. Once the users are registered, you can offer some additional benefits (eg newsletter) in their user account in turn of asking some of their data.  For example, if a user clicks on an option that he is looking for custom newsletters, you can ask for his email id or let him connect his user account with Facebook. This helps user with better user experience and marketers with useful user profile data.

Data is the secret weapon to take your business to whole new heights and social login helps you to achieve that data without annoying users. With the above mentioned three best practices businesses can get reliable first party user data which leads to more user oriented marketing decisions thereby improving revenue.