Why B2B Marketers Should Embrace Social Sign-In

The Content Marketing Institute recently published an outstanding analysis of the pros and cons of content registration forms. It's worth checking out – and if you follow just a handful of content marketing blogs, CMI would make a great addition to your short list.

I want to drill down, however, and focus on an interesting nugget that turned up in the CMI post: A link to a recent study, sponsored by Janrain and conducted by Blue Research, looking at how consumers view the online registration process.

A key finding: 77% of the respondents said a web site should offer a social sign-in option – that is, the ability to log in using Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social media credentials. In addition, 41% of the respondents said they prefer using social login over creating a new or guest account. Both of those numbers are up significantly from the 2010 results.

Now, here's a caveat: This is a B2C survey. Since this is a fundamental user-experience issue, however, I think the findings are applicable to a B2B audience.

Happier Users, Cleaner Data

Let's assume for a moment that I'm right. Let's also assume that social login could solve another problem: the 90% of web site visitors who say they regularly provide phony registration info to access gated content and services.

If you can cut into that number, move much cleaner data into your early-stage marketing funnel, and combine all of this with a drop in the number of visitors who abandon your web site after hitting a gate, then social sign-in could be worth quite a bit more than what you'll pay a provider like Gigya or Janrain. (Marketing automation tools also are adding social sign-in capabilities to their feature sets.)

There are some other drawbacks to social login, but they aren't as serious as they used to be. If you're worried about an outage at LinkedIn or Facebook taking down your login services, for example, you have a pretty trouble-free life.

Could you experiment with moving the registration process further up your marketing funnel by using social sign-in? That's one possibility. Another is combining social sign-in with additional registration tiers to collect more information over time from interested prospects.

In any case, the numbers tell a pretty convincing story: Social sign-in is now something that many consumers expect to see, and that means it's also going to play a bigger role when those consumers put on their business hats and engage with your content marketing initiatives.

Has your business experimented with social sign-in as part of a content marketing strategy? Let us know what you think.

Matthew McKenzie is the Senior Editor for DemandGen Report and Senior Director of Content for G3 Communications' Content4Demand division. As an editor and contributor for Seybold Publications, United Business Media and CNET, among many others, he's had a ringside seat at the online publishing circus since the days of Netscape and Alta Vista. Today, he spends his days helping B2B marketers craft effective content marketing strategies – including mobile-ready content