Sites live or die based upon whether or not people actually spend time on them. As the next big thing quickly becomes last Tuesday’s fad, it’s no longer enough to just be known. You’ve got to be the place to be. And to get people to not only pop in but spend more time and interact, you’ve got to be social. In short, every website needs its own party.
Gigya, the makers of Saas technology enabling a CRM platform, recently released research indicating that social logins and social plugins increase page views as well as time spent on a site. On average, logins double the number of page views a site gets, while comments, shares and news feeds nearly triple the results.
“From these points alone, it’s fairly easy to conclude that users want to be social wherever they go across the web,” blogged Patrick Salyer, Gigya’s CEO. “Diving a bit deeper, it seems that when a person logs into a site with social login, they’re doing so because they want to interact with the site and with their social graph, resulting in the same benefits of increased time spent and page views that social networks enjoy.”
And people like to wear different identities. While Facebook clearly dominated the rankings for the obvious reason of the site’s popularity, nearly 40 percent of all social logins came from other sites, which Salyer attributed to persona. He noted that on news and publishing sites, non-Facebook logins accounted for nearly 2/3 of all logins.
“What all this data tells us is that on-site social technology works. If users are viewing more pages and spending more time on sites and apps with social functionality, the value in investing in social is clear,” Salyer said. “…In 2012, expect to hear a lot more about not only how users are are interacting with sites using their social identities, but also how businesses are responding by catering to their users and reaching them like never before.”