Social Media is the new Identity!

Yes ! You heard it right and I am partially wrong. I am right because Social Media is taking over as a new means for Claiming an Identity, and I am partially wrong because it won’t be replacing traditional ways of creating and validating an Identity.

Social Media has been playing a crucial role in starting a Revolution or an Trend. From Official Business Pages on Social Media to live streaming, social media has become more than just a social platform. Now social media integrations are adding to productivity tools, further adding a boost to productivity tools.

There is a social media trend which is becoming very much popular and is adopted by 30% of the websites. Generally people do not see the change and if some does, it doesn’t look that of impactful change.

Social Login is a widely implemented change in web. Social login allows signing-up /logging-in via your social media account. Have you seen two partitions in an login/signup  page? (common social login implementation practice), either the side with traditional login and “sign in via social media” (varies) on other, followed by social media buttons or icons (theme dependent), below it (in front in case of small icons).

How Social Login helps? Social login eases customer’s registration process improving user experience on an website or app, hence saving time, consumed in filling signup form or remembering passwords. It has gained so much of popularity because of social media. Most of the users keep their social accounts logged in, and in phones, app like google+, tumblr, facebook, twitter etc is installed. Users are welcomed with variety of choices to log in from.

How Social Media is the new Identity? According to annual report by one of the top Customer Identity and Access Management providers, social media signups are more preferred and guess what… we have some new competitors here too. Popular sites like Netflix, Spotify, ESPN, Uber, Zomato etc. are using social login, which shows social login influence.

According to Customer Identity Preference Trends Q1 2016 Report  by LoginRadius, Facebook is dominating as the mostly used social platform compared to google and twitter, that’s obvious after seeing the impact of Facebook on Businesses and People. As I said earlier, there are some new competitors, Steam and Vkontakte. Although they are negligible in user base but they may matter to websites which have them in their vision.

From Business’s point of view, every social media site is important. Sign In percentage is not considered as a factor for businesses now, what matters is the quality of sign-up’s. For example, a fashion house has no relevance with LinkedIn signup button, but a pinterest button does.

In many ways, Social Media is becoming the consumer’s online identity, as a single online identity is being used everywhere to signup/signin. Genuineness of this identity is not 100% guaranteed but businesses consider most of it as genuine.