The advent of social media has emboldened us to foster personas for ourselves online.  But the social media landscape is fragmented.  We tend to use Facebook to interact with friends and family, Twitter to follow influencers and share opinions, LinkedIn as our professional network, and Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail to communicate directly with our important contacts.  Combined, more than 2.5 billion of us maintain accounts with these services, and social login solves the registration challenge by making it possible to use those identities to easily sign up and log in on sites across the web.

But which identity providers are the most popular choices?  Each quarter, we seek to answer this question by analyzing social login preferences for online consumers across all websites using Janrain.  Why do these trends matter for digital marketer?  Social login preferences are a leading indicator of consumer trust in the different online identity providers.  If I use my Google account to login and participate on sites across the web, for example, that choice serves as an indication of the trust and affinity felt toward Google’s service.

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When it comes to social login, our data shows that people want choice. Facebook currently leads as the most popular identity provider for social login.  During Q1, Facebook did lose ground to Google for the second consecutive quarter, dropping in popularity from 49% during Q4 2012 to 46% in Q1 2013, while Google’s share of social logins ascended from 31% to 34% during the same period.

Despite the moderate decrease in share of social logins during Q4, Facebook still remains the most popular choice for the ninth consecutive quarter.  After reaching an all-time quarterly high during Q3, Twitter’s share also decreased moderately during each of the last two quarters.

LinkedIn enjoys substantial popularity on sites that cater toward business professionals, with as many as 80% of business professionals choosing to log in with their LinkedIn identity on some B2B websites.  A majority of us maintain our professional online identity on LinkedIn. When using this identity to register on B2B sites, consumers can choose to grant the website access to their LinkedIn profile information, including a verified email address, first and last name, company name, job title and industry. The site can then use this information to conveniently pre-populate a sign-up form, which eliminates the need for consumers to fill out the form from scratch or enter lots of redundant details about themselves.

We also have observed disparate preferences across geographic regions.  For example, Hyves contends with Facebook as the most popular social network in the Netherlands, and social login preferences on Dutch websites substantiate that notion.  In Brazil and India, Orkut is a popular identity provider for social login, while in China, Sina Weibo and Renren maintain popularity.  Mixi is a common social login choice in Japan, while VK is preferred in Russia.

As with prior analyses, we have taken a sampling of sites in four industry verticals to measure trends in consumer login preferences.  While the overall story arc is similar, there are disparate preferences within each vertical that merit attention.

Despite its decreased share across all Janrain customer websites, Facebook still leads other social networks and email providers across prominent industry verticals including media, retail, entertainment and gaming, consumer brands, and music-related sites.  Its popularity is especially pronounced on entertainment, gaming, retail and consumer brand websites.

Google is performing well as the second most favored portable identity provider across each of these verticals, but its popularity is most evident on retail and consumer brand sites, which could perhaps be a reflection of the trust that people place in Google as a secure provider of their online identity. With Janrain’s recent launch of Google+ as a sign-in provider, we expect the propensity for consumers to choose a Google identity for social login to increase throughout 2013.

What do these findings mean for your business?  As you work to add a social layer to your site to improve engagement and drive conversions, social login and sharing should be fully integrated.  We hope these findings provide a useful benchmark as you optimize your on-site social media strategy.

For Digital Marketers:

Social login helps solve the challenge of how to collect more accurate data on your users while increasing registration conversion rates at the same time. Social login shortens the registration process to a single click and gives you instant permission-based access to rich demographic, psychographic and social graph data on your users. This social profile data can be leveraged for content personalization or product recommendations and more tailored segmentation and targeting. Social sharing enables your users to broadcast content and activities from your site to their social networks, increasing brand advocacy and creating an effective source of qualified referral traffic back to your site.

For Developers and Technologists:

It can be a big headache to implement the plumbing to each social network API on your own.  These networks use different protocols under the hood, such as OpenID, OAuth, hybrids and proprietary technologies. As a result, coding social login on your own requires a significant investment of time, engineering expertise and ongoing maintenance as the networks change their APIs, often without advanced notice. Your social login and sharing solution should allow you to easily connect to all the social networks by writing once to a single API. By cutting deployment times from weeks or months to a couple days, you can focus on your core competency while trusting that the social and user management tools on your site just work.

Success is determined by our ability to deliver exceptional products and services that delight our customers, and it also requires a high degree of trust. We believe that trust starts with openness and transparency. That’s why, as part of our ongoing commitment to promote transparency with our customers, we have introduced a new site to proactively communicate the status and availability of Janrain’s services – trust.janrain.com.

This site will be the primary resource for Janrain customers seeking to monitor the availability of the Janrain service as well as learn about our infrastructure, security and compliance. The trust.janrain.com site includes:

• Real-time and historical data on system performance
• Incident reports and notification of planned maintenance
• Information about how we safeguard and protect the privacy of your data
• Information on Janrain’s product infrastructure

Trust.janrain.com was inspired by conversations directly with our customers. We know that our customers hold us to a high quality standard, and we strive to provide you with the tools you need to hold us accountable to our commitments.

Please check out the site and bookmark it for future reference. And as always, don’t be shy about dropping us a line to let us know if you have any feedback.

That’s why we’re excited today to launch a new integration with Google+ Sign-In.  With this product launch, Janrain customers can streamline the registration process for Google users, and gather additional profile data to better engage with and improve their experience.

Here is a run down of what’s new:

Simple, secure login

Google+ Sign-In helps improve registration conversion rates by offering a convenient and secure way for visitors to sign up on your site. We’ve made it really easy for websites to get up and running with Google+ Sign-In via Janrain Engage Social Login.

Gather Additional Public Demographic Information

In addition to a verified email address and a first and last name, users can now choose to share additional information from their Google+ profile when they log in to your site. Collect demographic and psychographic data such as gender, location, birthdate, interests, work history, education history, relationship status, profile photo and any other information made public within the user’s Google+ profile.

Access Google+ Social Graphs

Google+ Sign-In enables users to provide access to their Google+ circles of friends. Utilize this social graph information to let users discover what their friends are up to on your site, interact with friends, and surface content recommended by friends.

Drive Adoption of Android Apps

Let your website users instantly download and install your mobile or tablet app to their Android device.  Your users with Android devices don’t need to visit the Google Play store to install your Android app – instead, you can easily prompt them to do so in a single click when they sign in to your site with their Google identity.

You are invited to check out Google+ Sign-in on NPR, HSN and several Universal Music Group artist websites, including LadyGaga.com, Eminem.com and JustinBieberMusic.com.

The team at Janrain has been hard at work, and we are excited to offer the benefits of Google+ Sign-In to you. As always, your feedback is welcome.

We work with many organizations that operate under the constraints of legacy, homegrown registration systems. These often require significant time and resource investments to maintain, augment or revamp to ensure that sites are collecting richer, and more accurate, profile information from their registered users.

We were the first to introduce a hosted registration solution for websites back in 2010. With our latest product release, we’ve made it even easier for our customers to rapidly deploy a comprehensive user registration solution packed with features to help ensure data quality, integrity, and maximize sign-up rates.

Here is an overview of just a few of the features supported within our next generation user registration solution, already deployed by global brands such as Mattel, Fox News, Cox Media Group, Dr Pepper, Whole Foods, the UK’s Channel 4 and others:

Customizable Data Collection Forms and Workflow

The new solution makes it easier to deploy customizable data collection forms for registration, newsletter sign-ups, polls, surveys, contests or promotions, or extending registration beyond your site by embedding forms within a branded social network presence. Dr Pepper, for example, has embedded registration forms as well as social login into custom Facebook tabs and applications to develop a deeper understanding of its fans.

Our solution also includes built in email confirmation workflows to take the hassle out of validating user identities upon sign-up.

Inline Field Validation

Our latest release has made it easier to take advantage of features that ensure data quality, such as inline field validation, dirty word filters and terms of service (TOS) acceptance. Validate email address or postal code formats in real-time, verify age or password requirements, and build integrity from the data you collect at registration.

Password Management and Reset Workflow

Our user registration solution enables you to deliver customizable password reset emails right to your user’s inbox, and handles password management and secure reset flows on your behalf.

User Profile Pages

Deploy configurable user profile pages that include name, email, demographics, photos, interests, subscription preferences and more. The solution helps build community engagement by empowering users to set individual fields in their site profiles as either public or private.

Conditional Workflows

We’ve built a new feature that allows sites to dynamically trigger new fields or flows based on previous inputs to a form, or existing profile data stored. Conditional workflows enable websites to collect richer data about their users by employing progressive profiling.

Mobile Web Optimization

These days, as much as 30% of web usage occurs via mobile phones, making it as critical ever for websites to offer optimized registration flows on mobile and tablet devices.  Our user registration solution enables customers to dynamically resize registration forms and user profile pages to provide an optimal mobile and tablet web experience for user registration and profile management.

Analytics Integrations

We’ve added a powerful new JavaScript API that empowers deeper insights about conversion funnels and registration.  The solution allows customers to easily integrate registration and login events into web analytics platforms such as Adobe SiteCatalyst, Coremetrics, Google Analytics and Webtrends.

Improved Speed and Performance

Lastly, our user registration solution is faster than ever.  We’ve made several performance enhancements to improve response times for all user data collection forms, profile pages and field validation rules. The new version of the solution abandons any use of embedded iframes – instead, all registration forms and profile pages render via HTML, CSS and JavaScript elements that are served from within the client.

The team at Janrain has been hard at work, and we’re very excited to bring the next generation of our industry-leading user registration solution to you. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Built using Facebook’s Open Graph technology, our one-click sharing features help websites increase exposure of their site content within Facebook, while addressing the privacy concerns that Facebook users have expressed over automatic sharing from social readers. Essentially, the feature puts users in direct control of how they share stories and other content with transparent messaging, the option to turn automatic sharing on or off at any time, and a countdown timer for auto shares.

You can see the feature in action at TMZ.com.  Click to read an article, and scroll down to the bottom of the article to interact with the one-click sharing widget.

Here is an overview of what’s new:

Contextual One-Click Sharing

Let users click a button to easily share contextual activities from your site in a single click, such as articles read, videos watched, products liked and more. Define actions within the share button based on the content of your site.

Optional Frictionless or Automatic Sharing

Users can choose to turn on frictionless sharing at any time, which automatically shares content that users interact with to Facebook.  The feature offers a clear, transparent opt-in and allows users to toggle automatic sharing on or off as they desire.

Countdown Timer Respects User Privacy and Transparency

For users who have turned on automatic sharing, a configurable countdown timer alerts users before content is shared to Facebook.  Users can conditionally opt out of sharing the message, or choose to un-share any content that has been published to Facebook.

Easy Implementation

Deployment of one-click sharing is quick and easy – if you’re a Janrain customer, you can be up and running in an hour or less.  Simply log in to your Janrain Engage dashboard or navigate to our product documentation to start using it.

This launch is a big step forward toward solving the privacy and transparency concerns that have hindered the popularity of social readers and frictionless sharing technology.  We’re very excited to bring these new features to you, and as always, we welcome your feedback.

Here’s what the media has to say:

• Janrain Rolls Out One-Click Sharing to Facebook as Alternative to Social Reader Apps
• Facebook Hopes Third-Party Social Reader Will Help Users Avoid Sharing Too Much
• Janrain Releases One-Click Tool for Social Sharers
• Janrain Unveils Frictionless Sharing Tool
• Janrain Offers New Facebook One-Click Sharing Tool
• Frictionless Sharing May Give Brands More Ad Options

Click here to download the full infographic [PDF].

Click here to download the full infographic [PDF].

Important Stats

• 86% of people may leave a website when asked to create an account | Click to share
• 50% of people dislike creating new passwords | Click to share
• 60% of people have more than 5 unique passwords to remember | Click to share
• 40% of people use the Forgot Password feature at least once a month | Click to share
• 88% of online users admit they have lied on form | Click to share
• 2 in 5 people would rather solve world peace than create a new password | Click to share
• 2 in 5 people would rather scrub a toilet than create a new password | Click to share
• 77% of online users prefer social login | Click to share
• Facebook is the preferred social login provider of choice | Click to share

Embed Code

<img src="http://janrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/how-to-solve-the-online-registration-challenge.png" alt="How to Solve the Online Registration Challenge Inforgraphic" width="600" /></p> <p><a href="http://bit.ly/registration-challenge">How to Solve the Online Registration Challenge</a> – An infographic by the team at <a href="http://janrain.com">Janrain</a>

With the Spring 2012 release, Janrain introduced several new remote provisioning and application management features, and core platform capabilities making it easy for its platform partners to offer a rich set of social features and customizations to their customers.

Remote Provisioning and Management

Several new API calls have been added to the Janrain Partner API to offer greater flexibility with remote configuration and management of Janrain Engage application instances from within the partner’s platform. Partners can now enable their customers to configure additional identity providers, reset their API key, add and remove administrators associated with their Engage application as well as request additional social data from their end-users at registration-time, all from within the partner’s platform.

Additional Integration Options

The OAuth2 compliant Backplane 2.0 protocol now facilitates the transfer of sensitive user information between applications through a secure server-side flow. With the release of Backplane 2.0, partner platforms have more than one mechanism of integrating social login offered by Janrain with their platform – the Engage API, the Plugin API and Backplane.

New Core Platform Features

Janrain’s platform partners can now offer their customers the following additional capabilities:

• Expanded Social Sharing: Enable customers’ end-users to share to a select group of friends/contacts, to their social networking walls or via email with the new social sharing widget and APIs.

• Additional Identity Providers: Offer end-users’ the ability to login with Asian providers such as Sina Weibo, Mixi, and RenRen in addition to Germany-based SoundCloud.

• Support for Regulated Industries: For partner platforms offering hosting, content management or tools for regulated industries, federal agencies, state, or local government websites, Janrain’s support for FICAM LoA1-compliant identity providers, makes it possible to offer frictionless registration via social/3rd party login on their websites.
• 3rd Party Analytics Integrations: Janrain’s widgets support JavaScript event hooks to measure registration, login and sharing events from within a platform customer’s analytics systems such as Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, CoreMetrics or Webtrends.
• Mobile Configuration and Development: Platform customers who utilize the Janrain dashboard for configuration of identity providers and widget layouts can customize and test the look and feel of social login and sharing UIs for iOS or Android-based mobile web and app experiences.
• Application Framework Support: Platform partners who develop mobile applications using Apache Cordova/PhoneGap, can use the Janrain Engage for iOS and Android PhoneGap plugin.
• Traditional Login Buttons: By simply adding a custom branded login button that represents a site specific id/password to the Janrain Engage sign-in widget, platform customers eliminate the need for username and password boxes on their sign-in interface.

Redesigned Documentation

Lastly, with the goal of making it easier to navigate Janrain’s rich set of capabilities, Janrain launched its new Developer portal, complete with quick-start guides, code examples and comprehensive API documentation.

If you are a current Janrain partner, we that hope you will immediately begin taking advantage of the above capabilities. We look forward to hearing your feedback at products@janrain.com.

To learn more about becoming a Janrain partner, please visit www.janrain.com/partners

Targeted Sharing to Selected Friends

Users can now browse a list of their friends from their social networks, choose recipients, and share to friends, followers and connections via direct messages on Twitter and LinkedIn.  The entire experience is contained within the social sharing widget.

Share to Gmail and Yahoo! Contacts via Email

Users can also browse their Gmail or Yahoo! address books and share content from your site to selected contacts via email, all from within the social sharing widget.

Rich Customization Abilities

Using a WYSIWYG dashboard, you can easily customize the layout, style and supported networks for the social sharing widget. CSS styling and a JavaScript API are available for advanced customizations.

Easy Implementation Using JavaScript

The widget can be up and running in minutes (or less).  Simply configure the social sharing widget within the Janrain dashboard and paste a few lines of JavaScript on your page to invoke the sharing widget.  It really is that easy!

You can see the new features in action on the Roadrunner Records website, which is using Janrain social sharing to increase site traffic from social networks back to music artist news articles or videos.  Alternatively, give the new sharing widget a spin on your own via the social sharing widget example page of our developers site.

So, what are you waiting for?  Taking advantage of the new Janrain Engage social sharing features improves brand exposure and generates high-converting referral traffic.  Let us know what you think.

Click here to download the full infographic [PDF].

Click here to download the full infographic [PDF].
Learn how to get social login and sharing on your site.

Embed Code:

<img src="http://janrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/infographic-janrain-q1-social-login-trends.png" alt="Social Login and Social Sharing Trends Across the Web" width="540" /></p> <p><a href="http://bit.ly/M8AGgA">Social Login and Social Sharing Trends Across the Web</a> – An infographic by the team at <a href="http://janrain.com">Janrain</a><br />

Hey Kevin, thanks for sitting down with me to discuss the topic of password security. Given some of the breaches that have been well-publicized recently, I think this is a very timely discussion.

Can you walk me through the process most websites go through to collect and store a password for a new user?

Kevin: The typical scenario involves a user visiting a site and finding compelling content that gives her an incentive to register. The user is then asked to create a new account and password, and in doing so, knows that she may forget anything very long, complex or one that is used infrequently. So, the user types a short password that is as close to the exact password they use everywhere else. The site then stores that password, and as a nod to security, may hash it or even add a little salt. This means that the user risks having her password stolen from the site, and the site assumes responsibility for storing and securing passwords.

Now, the typical result from our experience is that the user hates this process enough to either never start or abandon the process part way through, lie about who they are, or resentfully comply and expose the password they use everywhere. The latter result exposes the site to the possible nightmare of a password-revealing security breach.

It sounds like a flawed system. How did this paradigm of password management come to fruition?

Kevin: In the beginning there was the command line, and any one could walk up to any computer terminal and type commands that could be potentially harmful. The advent of usernames and passwords were a great boon to security. It was a system that was arguably adequate for the needs of the ’60s and ’70s. In the ‘80s however, modems, networks and the Internet changed first how we connected and then ultimately who was connecting. This at once created higher risk and greater usability demands.

In the rush to market, sites slapped the familiar user-name and password login prompts in front of retail, community, gaming and even entertainment sites. The rise of email giants and social networks adopted by the general public seems to have cemented the expectation of the familiar dialog in society’s psyche.

What have websites done to try to mitigate risks associated with password hacking?

Kevin:  Typically, they have tried one of three things:

1. Requiring more complex passwords.
2. Requiring longer passwords or passphrases.
3. Requiring additional authentication factors.

And why don’t these options work well for most people?

Kevin:  Being required to remember long, complex, or unique passwords is a huge burden for most people. People also don’t like being made to feel interrogated, which is often the case when asking complex security questions to prove a person’s identity.

As people, we are known to be slow, lazy and demanding. We have difficulty memorizing. We don’t want to be bothered with security at all, but we demand that sites assume the responsibility for security. This puts us in an adversarial position with the site before we even get through the front door.

A formal party or a nightclub might ask to see your credentials at the door, but one would look for other venues if everyone at the party asked to see them before they would talk to you or introduce you to their friends. In the real world we assume people are who they say they are because other people upstream vouch for them; starting with the host and or doorman.

Also, being required to do anything more than once, and not being recognized and rewarded for being a returning patron on a site can be a source of frustration for many people.

So, traditional registration and password practices are a huge burden for most people. Beyond security risks, what challenges do websites experience as a result of requiring password creation from users upon registration?

Kevin:  For websites, having anonymous, masked users consuming, creating and sharing content isn’t ideal. Sites want to be able to recognize their active users and offer personalization to improve the experience. But asking users to create and remember a password for each site they frequent often results in low conversion and high abandonment rates.

Alright, enough about the problems that exist today. Let’s talk about solutions – what are the most prominent ones that have been applied today?

Kevin:  Social Login is the most viable solution to tackle this problem, and it is gaining real momentum in the market.

Speaking abstractly, what are some key user experience elements that websites can implement to delight their users and customers?

Kevin:  I’ll go ahead and mention a few suggestions and best practices based on how our customers are achieving success:

• Notice who brought them to the party. For example, use the referrer as a clue and a recommendation for authentication. If a person was referred to your site from Twitter, prompt them to login to your site with their Twitter identity when the time is right.
• Let users flash their ID quickly and easily. In other words, let them login with a single click.
• Let users choose which identity to use when you first meet; accommodate choice by providing them with the option to login using their preferred identity, whether it is via Google, Facebook, Yahoo! or others.
• Assure users that you are keeping only the information you need to provide them with a great experience on your site.
• Assure them that what information you do keep is safe and secure and that you follow best-practices and use best-in-class services.
• Remember users when they come back to your site, and welcome them back with an optimal return experience. Don’t act as if you have not seen them before.
• Provide a highly-validated identity or multiple identities, honor that trust by allowing them to go longer between logins.

What’s the best way for a site to offer all this goodness?

Kevin:  The best way is to outsource user management to a best-in-class SaaS provider. Get more than a login system; get a full-user management platform that provides security and service on the back-end as well as the front.

Can a site really operate without passwords?

Kevin: Yes. Even when your site is built on a framework, CMS, or e-commerce platform that would seem to require them. Social login eliminates the need to store passwords on your site, because you are relying on a trusted, secure identity provider (such as Google, Yahoo! or Facebook) to prove that users are who they say they are.

Do we have to go all the way? Can we offer social login and still keep our traditional username/password system?

Kevin:  You certainly don’t have to go all the way. Tradition is strong and change is often resisted from people. You can accommodate traditional logins for your existing users and even accept new user accounts and traditional passwords, but I recommend leading with social login as it is both more secure and more convenient for people. The best practice that we recommend is to state those benefits in a prominent, plain and distinct manner.

What does this look like in practice?

Here is a screenshot from Samsung.com:

What does the flow look like?

Are sites doing this now?

Kevin:  Yes, definitely. Leaders across many industries like Samsung, Intuit, Whole Foods, NPR, NASDAQ and others are showing the way by letting their users register and login with an existing identity from a social network or email provider.

What about the Future?

Kevin:  Science is on it! And when discoveries are made, you can bet that Janrain will be making them easy to integrate with your organization’s web presence. Meanwhile, we at Janrain created a suite of flexible user management products and have done some deep thinking that can help you apply these ideas today!

Any recommended reading for those who want to learn more?

Kevin:  Yes. If you’re interested in reading more about this topic, I’d recommend checking out any of these articles:

• When you must create a password, check out this guide to navigate that hazardous path.
• Michael Olson from our marketing team blogs about the past, present and future of OpenID, and how it was developed to address login and password challenges in the market.
• Google at Cloud Identity Summit says “Its time to eliminate passwords!”
• TechCrunch Article on OpenID/Google Account Chooser and Janrain Login Helper
• ZDNET says IBM passwords are to become fossils
• CreditCards.com talks to OpenID and asks: Can your social network protect against fraud?