Being a social media consultant in Philadelphia I’ve noticed that many of my customers and potential customers don’t have a decent website much less have the need for social sign in. I often have to point them towards hosting services like www.hostiserver.com and CMS systems like WordPress to get them to make something more substantial before we can set to proper work.
Anyway, for those who don’t know, social sign in is the box that pops up when you go to enter a site that says something like “Sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account.” You click on the facebook icon and two things happen, you get access to the site and the site gets access to your email address and anything else you’ve posted on facebook. This is all part of the facebook open graph and it’s VERY powerful stuff for the business. If there was a cheap and easy way for businesses to integrate this type of technology I feel like they’d be much more willing to give it a try.
My question is, is this available for small businesses? There are so many other tools available for businesses like cannabis hosting and WordPress design, so I went on a little hunt and came up with a few solutions.
1. Gigya
This is big company that has been at it for a long time. If you have a very small business this is the way to go, but for anything over 1,000 users they charge, get this, $15,000 per year. This is the cats meow of social sign in as it also offers a slew of other plugins and services such as a social crm and cloud hosting but for businesses other than Nike or Forbes I’m afraid it’s a little to pricey. Check out some of the articles that our friends at Mashable have posted about Gigya.
2. Social Annex
While they’re not quite as buttoned up as Gigya, Social Annex is a nice way to incorporate social sign in while optimizing stickiness through rewards programs. They have some cool functions such as social gift sharing that is very much tailored to retail. Check out this video for a short services breakdown. According to this article the cost can be anywhere from $1,000 – $8,000 per month which is still a little high for small to mid sized businesses.
3. Ajungo / Social Pass
Locally here in Philadelphia I just came across a great new product that incorporates social sign in with checkins. Ajungo created this as a by-product of their travel website which currently sits at Ajungo.com. Their current site basically lets you see what others have said and taken pictures of at destinations around the globe. The new product for businesses will still pull pictures and content from checkins but it will pull it from your business and let you integrate it into your website. If you want to check out a site that’s using it jump to kingsoaklane.com. While the photos and sign in is nice to have it’s still all about the data. Their dashboard will allow you to see who your regulars are, how often they come, who they bring, what they watch on tv and a million other great pieces of information. The pricing is going to be between $50 and $100 per month. We will be incorporating it into our promotions site Oneupevents.com once they’ve polished it a bit more. If you’d like more info on this follow up with us by emailing Rob@smalltalkmedia.com
The three choices above are by no means a completed list. There’s a lot more of these products floating around, but in my research they were all too pricey for small to mid sized businesses. When I meet with my clients I preach data mining, data preparation, and audience analysis but most of them want nothing to do with it, but this is something too easy to pass up and I will be integrating it immediately into all Small Talk Media accounts.