Social login vendor Gigya today published statistics showing Facebook’s overwhelming domination of the social identity provider market. The result is unsurprising for Facebook, but Twitter’s poor share remains unexplained.
Even if you aren’t familiar with Gigya, you’re familiar with the service they provide to countless websites and apps. When you’re prompted to login (or register), and you have the option to do so using an existing social media account, the chances are you’re interacting with the Gigya API.
In this new infographic, Gigya shows Facebook continuing a long-standing trend of dominance when it comes to users’ choice of social platform for social identity purposes. It accounts for 64 percent of social logins, with Google+ lagging behind at 20 percent, a proportion more or less repeated when the data is broken down by region. Twitter, perhaps surprisingly, lags well behind at 6 percent.
But wait. Is that really surprising? According to current data (there’s a comprehensive, if hard to navigate. list of social media usage stats here), Facebook has almost 1.4 billion monthly “active users.” Twitter and Google+ are each stuck around the 300 million mark. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that Facebook is outperforming Google+ five to one; that’s exactly what one would expect.
If anything, Twitter is under-performing–it should account for 18 to 20 percent of social logins–and it would be interesting to know why. Maybe individual users are much more likely to use a real name (or something resembling their real name) on Facebook than on Twitter, making the former account more appropriate for interacting with other websites.
Whatever the reason, it’s good news for anyone using websites or apps with social login for targeted marketing purposes. Facebook collects far more data on users than Twitter does–ironically, one of the reasons I’d always choose Twitter over Facebook for social login purposes.
