Facebook rallies hashtags FAIL? Social Login rules

I am guessing Mark Zuckerburg is a very happy man this man week. Thanks to a 20 percent jump in Facebook’s value, his personal wealth now stands at approximately $3.8 billion and all achieved in a single day to boot. This is has partly to do with a renewed mobile strategy. Facebook on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry  are all ad supported and Zuckerberg has declared Facebook will replicate the same with Instagram, much to the dismay of many of its original adopters.

According to Forbes: “Facebook’s shares closed at a one-year high of $34.36, following a strong earnings report in which the Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm handily beat analysts’ estimates”.  Is this a one off feat? Draw your own conclusions, but perhaps this tweet by the Street sums it all up:

The fact is, many of Facebook’s new enhancements havent exactly caught on, take hashtags for example. Roughly 40% of Twitter users  actally click on hashtags to learn more about products and brands, but the same isn’t true of Facebook, according to a Simply Measured analysis. One-fifth of top brands now include hashtags in their Facebook posts, but there’s no evidence yet that posts with hashtags perform any better than those without. Photos, not hashtags, were the main feature that drove Facebook engagement, the study found. 

Helen Leggatt writing for bizreport says

“Instead, visual content is by far the major driver of engagement on Facebook. Photos posted by top brands average more than 9,400 engagements (which include Likes, comments, and shares) per post, while video posts average more than 2,500 engagements”.

REPORT: Facebook Hashtags, Post Engagement, And Industry Leaders – By Simply Measured from Simply Measured

Where Facebook has been excelling is in the area of social login use. Facebook is still the dominant provider of social logins and shared content, A space that I would have expected Twitter to dominate, especially in a business enviroment. According to new data from  Gigya, Facebook commands 52 percent of all social logins and 50 percent of all shared content. Gigya surveyed its pool of brand clients during the last quarter and found that Google is making notable gains as a social login provider, doubling from 12 percent to 24 percent of all social login activity on their respective sites.

On their blog Gigya says

“Social Login has become a standard on the web and on mobile devices, with the world’s largest businesses implementing the technology on their web properties so that their users can quickly register and login with their existing social identities, and so that those businesses can gain valuable permission-based data about their users. And while consumers have clearly demonstrated that they want to use their social identities across the web, they also demand the ability to choose from a variety of identity providers when they register and log into sites”.

The below infographic, which is composed of data from all Gigya clients in Q2 (April – June) 2013, reveals some remarkable trends in how consumers use their identities within different types of sites and apps.

Source: Gigya