Social Identity: 7 Best Practices for Driving Registrations

1
   Social Identity:
7 Best Practices for Driving
Registrations

Enabling people to register using an existing identity from Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo,
or other provider is one of the most powerful registration tools to emerge in the last
few years. Registering people through an established online identity not only
streamlines the registration process but also gives your business a head start on
building deeper relationships with them.

As with any optimization effort, the devil is in the details. An effective system
requires as much attention to user experience as to technology. The most successful
implementations follow these seven best practices:

1. Put social network brands to work
2. Provide identity options
3. Communicate the value
4. Apply available data
5. Link accounts
6. Create visual cues
7. Analyze to optimize

Best practice #1: Put social network brands to work on your home page
Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and the other providers are powerful brands that
can help increase registration rates simply through brand recognition and affinity.
Best practice is to display a minimum of three social network icons on the home
page, and above the fold, to indicate that visitors can sign in using a social network
Applying Social Identity    www.gigya.com 
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   identity. It is important to clearly label or call-out the social network icons as
registration options, so people do not confuse them with icons used for sharing.

"The
social
network
brands
are
powerful
forces for driving To enable access to more than three options, you can include a "more" button or people to arrow, which when clicked launches a full menu of choices, as in the mylifetime.com register example below: on your
site"



One caveat to putting these powerful brands to work is ensuring the entire process
still feels like it is part of your site. Be sure that the authentication window for each
provider is compact, centered, and made to feel part of the site to make the process
appear seamless. Note how the Twitter authentication window below appears as a
natural part of the process:
Applying Social Identity    www.gigya.com 
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Insider tip: Users are drawn to the social network icons, so you can maximize
participation by making the social network icons as prominent, if not more prominent,
than the link to traditional registration options.

Best practice #2: Offer multiple identity options
A key goal of every site should be to maximize the number of people who are able to
register using an existing identity. The best way to do this is to offer people their
choice of identities to use on your site, and at least three choices at a minimum.
Identity providers include social networks, webmail platforms and other OpenID
issuers such as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn.

Applying Social Identity    www.gigya.com 
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   The chart below illustrates the average mix of connections by provider in the month
of May 2010. Across millions of connections on client sites, we find that Facebook is the identity of choice for approximately 46% of visitors. That means if you don't offer your visitors other options, you may be leaving more than half of them out and losing "If you the opportunity to strengthen the relationship. don't offer your visitors
multiple
identity
options,
you may
be
leaving
more
than half
of them
out"
Insider Tip: Consider using a vendor that aggregates all of the social network
connections to make it easier to implement and manage multiple identity options


Best Practice #3: Provide a reason to register - and use an existing identity
Fox news does a terrific job of explaining to new visitors why they should register: it's
required to comment. They even demonstrate how they will personalize the
experie... [download for more]