As we rang in the New Year here at Gigya, we took a look at our data from 2011 to take stock of the year and to measure how our technology has impacted our clients.

In short, 2011 was incredible. Our technology is now trusted by over 40 percent of the web’s top 100 properties (comScore) and reaches a billion users across nearly 500 enterprises. Gigya’s technology went live with some of the leading enterprises in the world including Pepsi, Microsoft, NBC Universal and Dell. We built our team to over 100 employees and launched new products like Gamification, Ratings & Reviews and our Social Identity Management Platform, all while offering the best enterprise-class client service around.

Now, without further ado: the data.

The results clearly show that on-site social technology brings real value to sites. Perhaps most notably, we can see that social login and social plugins are correlated with major increases in time spent on-site and page views. The biggest increases in time spent and engagement are seen when users leverage social login and interact with our Comments plugin allowing them to share opinions on content and interact with other users – including those from their social graph – on-site. From these points alone, it’s fairly easy to conclude that users want to be social wherever they go across the web.

Diving a bit deeper, it seems that when a person logs into a site with social login, they’re doing so because they want to interact with the site and with their social graph, resulting in the same benefits of increased time spent and page views that social networks enjoy. In essence, social login is acting as a gateway for user engagement with plugins like Comments, Sharing, Game Mechanics and Activity Feed. For example, on the Pepsi SoundOff site (a Gigya client), the first step to interacting with the site and with other users is to log in socially. When that connection is made, users can instantly participate in all of the site’s social activities like commenting, sharing and earning points/rewards.

With regard to choice of identity providers, we can infer that while Facebook dominates in the percentage of logins, clearly people prefer choice when it comes to social login. Facebook’s dominance  makes sense – more than 800 million use it and it offers the most robust set of features for people to connect with their social graph. Yet seeing other identity providers catching nearly 40 percent of logins raises an obvious question: why?

The major reason comes down to personas. People choose different personas depending on where they login around the web. We discussed this concept more in-depth on VentureBeat a few months ago and we firmly believe that we wear different “hats” on the web much as we do in the real world. For example, our internal data tells us that certain types of properties, like news and publishing sites, actually see non-Facebook identity providers make up for two thirds of social logins.

Finally, what all this data tells us is that on-site social technology works. If users are viewing more pages and spending more time on sites and apps with social functionality, the value in investing in social is clear. But that’s really just the beginning. Now with products like our Social Identity Management Platform, businesses can leverage all the rich, permission-based social data that users bring with them when they login via identity providers like Facebook, Twitter and Google. In 2012, expect to hear a lot more about not only how users are are interacting with sites using their social identities, but also how businesses are responding by catering to their users and reaching them like never before.

– Patrick Salyer, CEO
@patricksalyer