• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, May 14, 2012

According to the current quarterly study by Janrain Engage, across 365,000 websites analyzing social login and social sharing preferences, Facebook is the most popular option at 45%, while a majority would rather use a different social identity, such as Google, Yahoo! or Twitter.

Because the social media landscape is fragmented, notes the report, the study helps to determine which identities people prefer both for sign-in and content sharing that can be used to speed up registration on sites across the web.

People use Facebook to interact with friends and family, Twitter to follow influencers and share opinions, LinkedIn for their professional network, and Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail to communicate directly with contacts.  Combined, these networks boast over 1.5 billion accounts. 

Facebook’s share of social logins has increased steadily over the past two years.  While Google’s share declined moderately during the first three quarters of 2011, though overall preference for Google has increased 2% since Q4 2011, with Google+ rapidly scaling users and adoption, says the report.

The report says that, as with prior reports, that they have taken a sampling of sites in four industry verticals to measure trends in consumer login preferences.  While the overall story arc is similar, says the report, there are disparate preferences within each vertical. Shown here is a selection of the more complete data available from Janrain.

Facebook’s popularity for social login on eCommerce websites has declined moderately from 49% to 43% during the past two quarters. Increasingly, retailers are offering social shopping experiences on their eCommerce sites that leverage a consumer’s Facebook social graph. Yahoo!’s share of social logins on retail sites has plummeted since 2009, mostly due to Google and Facebook.

On media websites, Yahoo! and Google are running strong as the second and third most popular providers.  Despite a modest decline during the past several quarters, Yahoo! continues to perform best in this vertical.  Twitter’s share within this segment has yet to accelerate.

Windows Live (Hotmail/MSN), historically a strong performer on entertainment and gaming sites, has experienced a notable decline in share of social logins during the past year.

On mobile applications, Facebook and Google lead in popularity, followed by Twitter and Yahoo!. Twitter’s improvement in popularity on mobile devices could be a result of its OAuth integration with Apple iOS 5 for social login, which has further socialized mobile users to rely on Twitter as an authentication mechanism on portable devices, opines the report.

More than ever, people are sharing comments, purchases, reviews and other content from the web to their social networks. Facebook and Twitter are far and away the most popular sharing destinations, but Yahoo!, LinkedIn and MySpace maintain preference on niche sites that are catered to their audience (B2B sites for LinkedIn and music sites for MySpace).  During the past two quarters, Twitter’s popularity as a sharing destination has increased at a more prominent rate than other social networks.

In concluding, the report offers a summary of suggestions for marketers in the use of the data. The author notes that social login shortens the registration process to a single click and provides instant access to rich demographic, psychographic and social graph data on users. This social profile data can be leveraged for content personalization or product recommendations and more tailored segmentation and targeting. Social sharing lets users broadcast content and activities from the marketers site to their social networks, increasing brand advocacy and creating an effective source of qualified referral traffic.