To get a view into the social login scene, Gigya processed 58
million social logins across 700 brands and publishers' properties
during the fourth quarter of 2015. And before delving into each
company's respective share of the social login scene, it's worth
looking at how often each of the four platforms is offered as a
social login option. Again, not surprisingly, Facebook and Google
are offered as options nearly 100% of the time. Twitter and Yahoo
aren't. Twitter is offered 72% of the time and Yahoo 35% of the
time.
In addition to the sheer size of Facebook's user base, Facebook
has benefitted from the privacy controls it presents people when
they log into a third-party site or app using their Facebook
account, said Reeyaz Hamirani, Gigya's head of corporate
communications who collected and analyzed the data that was
provided to Ad Age. For example, people can see what information
from their Facebook profile the brand or publisher wants to
access.
Facebook has added to its social login lead specifically on
mobile where it accounted for 80% social logins in the fourth
quarter, compared to Google's 14% and Twitter's 5%, Mr. Hamirani
said. Yahoo registered less than a percentage point.
While Facebook's dominance shouldn't be surprising, Google's
relative resurgence of late may be. During the second half of 2015,
the search giant shaved four percentage points off Facebook's share
of total social logins. Facebook still ended the year with more
than double Google's share of the market, but the third and fourth
quarters marked the first time that Facebook experienced share
declines in two consecutive quarters since Gigya began tracking
social logins in 2011, Mr. Hamirani said.
"Both of the drops were attributed straight to Google," Mr.
Hamirani said. "It's one of those things where Facebook may have
hit a saturation point with social authentication." Additionally
Google has tweaked the appearance of its social login buttons from
showing the Google+ logo to now showing the Google logo, and that
may have eliminated confusion among people who may have Gmail
accounts but don't use Google+ and led them to opt for a non-Google
login, he said.
The trend suggests that Google's introduction of its own social
network Google+ in 2011 wasn't all for naught. Google+ may have
been considered a Facebook wannabe -- and it never grew into a
legitimate Facebook rival -- but
a
lot
of
people have maintained that Google+ was really about organizing
Google's broad product line around a single universal account. The
idea of a universal account is important because Facebook has been
able to parlay its own user accounts into a digital advertising
powerhouse. It is using those accounts to gather an increasing
amount of data about its users, target them with ads on and off
Facebook, and gauge how those ads translate into business outcomes,
like sales and site visits, for advertisers.
Unlike Facebook and Google, the trend in Twitter's share of the
social login market over the past year has stayed relatively flat,
closing 2015 at 7%. That aligns with the
slower growth of the social network's own logged-in audience,
and Mr. Hamirani attributed it to the lower amount of information
that Twitter is able to share with a brand or publisher, which
limits those companies' abilities to personalize their site or app
to the individual user.
In contrast to Facebook's dominance, Google's growth and
Twitter's steadiness, Yahoo continues to see its popularity
decline, which appears to reinforce media buyers' assertion that
Yahoo's lack of a large enough logged-in user base has hurt its
advertising business. Yahoo's share of the social login market
peaked at 18% in the third quarter of 2013 and has dwindled to 4%
in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to Gigya.
