Social Auth — Yes or No?

By Siddhanta on November 2, 2015 10 Comments / 3196 views

Hi,

While we’ve just finished coding Social Auth for our new service, I stumbled across this interesting article which set me thinking.

https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/

I’m a little annoyed with myself now for jumping onto the social auth bandwagon without giving it much thought, something i’m not often prone to. Since we’re already ready with it, and since every single new user is like gold at this stage, I’m going to keep it with the hope that it eases the sign up process for prospective users. However the question lingers,

Does social auth dilute your brand at all?

Would love to hear thoughts and results you’ve seen with your new products and apps.

Many thanks,

sid

@OfSpinto

www.facebook.com/siddhanta.pinto

Comments

Siddhanta

10 Comments

asha chaudhry November 2, 2015, 12:12 pm

hey sid,

you got a twitter handle? pls add it at the end of your post. will help me mention you while tweeting this!
Rishi November 2, 2015, 12:24 pm

It depends. As a user, sometimes I’m tempted to try some apps because it is easy to use social login. On the other hand, in some cases, I wonder why didn’t the developers implement their own auth. If it’s a consumer app/website I prefer a social login over custom auth because I know most developers aren’t good with auth/security – it’s never a priority for them in the beginning, or they are not equipped to do it etc. I don’t trust them with my data.

Wouldn’t pay too much attention to such posts and see what works for you 🙂
Siddhanta November 3, 2015, 4:08 am

Thanks Asha!

Its @OfSpinto
Abey John November 3, 2015, 5:36 am

The bottomline is this: Sometimes it makes a lot of sense, and other times it’s just not worth the trade-offs. But don’t use them because they’re on every other popular app. Use them because they serve a purpose for your business and your users.

If you are just outta the gate then social auth is a greater trust builder.

The case for social auth is essentially to do with getting their email ids, interest data etc. If you don’t get that then social auth is not really worth it. Coz the interest data will help build demographic and psychographic profile that will form an input into creating customer personas and from there provide the gray matter for copy, ads, etc.

IMO brand dilution due to social auth is a vampire idea that will vaporize in the light of day. For mailchimp it may make sense. You have to see whether it helps or detracts from your overall brand strategy.
Siddhanta November 3, 2015, 9:14 am

Thanks Abey.

Keeping it for sure. Just wondering, if you’ve been down that road, do you have any trends or figures that indicate social auth is highly used?
Siddhanta November 3, 2015, 10:00 am

Thanks Rishi!

Interesting that you said you prefer social auth because of the security angle ! I always assumed it was convenience, and less to remember that attracted users to social auth.
Gururaj S November 3, 2015, 1:25 pm

I agree with your points, Abey.

If the business is in B2C domain, it makes sense to connect to more people, and know them better. And, know quickly!

For B2B, it depends on how one views the brand issues, vis a vis knowing the person who chooses to sign up (for trial, or for later use) on behalf of the client organization.

If there is any service outage by any third party service provider, it may *affect* log in to your site, for those users who chose to use that SM profile. If possible, think of linking up the SM id with a local id (auto created for their use, and notified via email) on your portal can be of help. Let the user use either of the log in options!
Abey John November 3, 2015, 3:09 pm

Sorry no dont have any data on that. But in my own experience for sites that I trust I tend to use social auth as logging in does not require me to remember the password for that specific site.
Saikat Sengupta November 3, 2015, 9:34 pm

I prefer Social Auth. Reason being I don’t need to create another account and remember (save) the credentials. Creating profile and then verifying email and then uploading your bio and photo – not worth it all the time. Secondly, Social Auth looks a safe and mature approach to me.

Only thing I am concerned about is whether the application would send irrelevant message to my connections OR automatically post stupid stuff on my timeline. For example, you would see stupid games, puzzles on FB every now and then … Which Mahabharat character you are … Which city you used to live in 1500 AD … How you used to look 5 years ago….and then … How you will die!!! I an never going to use Social Auth for this type of applications!
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal November 15, 2015, 12:09 pm

weird! therodinhoods.wpengine.com is completely (rather only) powered by social auth and we have no problems

ning.com – the platform that powers therodinhoods.wpengine.com has provided pretty seamless tools to avoid the heartache mentioned in the mail chimp article!