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Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

blog.mailchimp.com

21–30 of 76 posts

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#21
post #6

This is bad advice for anyone that's not a SaaS company selling to people on non-mobile browsers, like MailChimp is. Our analytics show that many people on mobile and consumer websites do indeed want to use OAuth. (I've been meaning to do a blog post on this topic...)

It's also true for SaaS. Many of our signups are from Facebook or Linkedin social login. It's one button for the user vs multiple fields.

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#22

Here how I read this; "Since social login buttons aren't worth it, it's best to setup a login based on email and manage an email communication with your users instead of social ones. And by the way, Mailchimp may help you with your communication with your customers. Now remove those social buttons and come back to email". Funnily, I agree with the conclusion and I'm using mailchimp extensively.

One key thing I think is to have the email as a username. I know this is generally done anyway these days but as someone who helps maintain a system where users have "usernames" separate to email addresses, there is a high support cost to this. I overhear a lot of support enquiries with "No, enter your username, not your email address! We've emailed you your username".

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#23

> Our old login form told users, "Your username or password is incorrect," when they may have the username right, but the password was incorrect. If you have 4 possible usernames and 4 possible passwords, you have 16 possible combinations between them—only one of which is correct. That means in this scenario, the user would have 15 chances to make an error when logging in. But when you know specifically that your use…

[deleted]

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#24

> Our old login form told users, "Your username or password is incorrect," when they may have the username right, but the password was incorrect. If you have 4 possible usernames and 4 possible passwords, you have 16 possible combinations between them—only one of which is correct. That means in this scenario, the user would have 15 chances to make an error when logging in. But when you know specifically that your use…

the reason for it is specifically addressed in the article... "But after some further consideration, we decided that it was a false risk, as the username reminder form already tells you if a username exists"

For usernames it might be true but many sites use emails instead of usernames (and rightfully so, it's already complicated for people to remember passwords without forcing them to also remember an unique username).

Emails are more personal and might be easier to link back to personal information. Thus, confirming that there is an associated account with a given email is also a privacy leak, because maybe people don't want to reveal that they have an account on a specific website.

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#26
post #21
post #6

This is bad advice for anyone that's not a SaaS company selling to people on non-mobile browsers, like MailChimp is. Our analytics show that many people on mobile and consumer websites do indeed want to use OAuth. (I've been meaning to do a blog post on this topic...)

It's also true for SaaS. Many of our signups are from Facebook or Linkedin social login. It's one button for the user vs multiple fields.

I can second that. Having interviewed a number of SaaS vendors as part of the customer development work we've been doing at StartHQ (https://starthq.com) it became apparent that some vendors are seeing as many as 60% of their sign ups using Google OAuth.

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#27
post #6

This is bad advice for anyone that's not a SaaS company selling to people on non-mobile browsers, like MailChimp is. Our analytics show that many people on mobile and consumer websites do indeed want to use OAuth. (I've been meaning to do a blog post on this topic...)

Thank you for this comment. I came here just to ask what others experienced. I love these buttons (all hail confirmation bias). It would be great to hear from other peoples experiences whether their users use oauth or not.

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#28
I have the pleasure of being on the receiving end of a lot of feedback for SaaS and other web development projects, and one piece of feedback we constantly we receive is how much more signups / logins my customers see from adding social sharing buttons.

On a personal level, I use social sharing sign up and login buttons almost 80% of the time in place of regular buttons, and am very OK with doing that from a security perspective personally.

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#29
post #6

This is bad advice for anyone that's not a SaaS company selling to people on non-mobile browsers, like MailChimp is. Our analytics show that many people on mobile and consumer websites do indeed want to use OAuth. (I've been meaning to do a blog post on this topic...)

From my experience with a B2C site, we see around 50% use password and 50% use social logins.

The problem however is that people easily forget what they used to login with, and when they try things like a password reset, we can't really reset their passwords if they used social logins. Or they might forget whether they used google or facebook to login...

So the main problem that I personally have with social logins is that they create fragmentation, and a simple login form becomes a memory-exercise for the user.

Re: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

#30
post #6

This is bad advice for anyone that's not a SaaS company selling to people on non-mobile browsers, like MailChimp is. Our analytics show that many people on mobile and consumer websites do indeed want to use OAuth. (I've been meaning to do a blog post on this topic...)

From my experience with a B2C site, we see around 50% use password and 50% use social logins. The problem however is that people easily forget what they used to login with, and when they try things like a password reset, we can't really reset their passwords if they used social logins. Or they might forget whether they used google or facebook to login... So the main problem that I personally have with social logins i…

This is actually a pain point our company (https://www.dailycred.com) solves.

If a user forgets the method they used to sign up, we'll still return the right user record to your app.

Be careful implementing this, because it can be a security issue if you're not cautious.

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