Wouldn’t it be nice if you had the capability to gather information on all of the social users that engage with your brand, business, or website? What if you had a single resource for all of your social plugins that worked to improve user engagement and ultimately increase conversions? That would be a great tool to have. What if I told you there’s a company that might be right for your business to help you do all of that and more? There is. It’s called Gigya.
What is Gigya?
I’m a little surprised that I have never really heard much about Gigya. I spend a lot of time writing, researching, and using the web to learn about online marketing everyday. When I did come across some articles about Gigya, their service immediately piqued my interest – as well as embarrassed me for my lack of awareness. I realized I was missing out on something that more and more companies are embracing.
Robin Wilding at Social Technology Review has one of the most fitting descriptions of what Gigya is when he writes, “Gigya is to social media what the Swiss Army Knife is to camping – a lifesaver.” Gigya is a social infrastructure tool aimed at businesses of all sizes. They perform a wide variety of services from plugin management, data gathering, user management, and much more.
A quick visit to Gigya’s homepage and you’ll see that they work with clients like ABC, CBS, CNN, Comcast, Discovery, Oprah, Microsoft, any other big name company you can think of. There are literally hundreds of businesses and companies using Gigya every day to improve their social media integration data management, and analytics.
What Can Gigya Do for You?
Gigya offers a surprising suite of ever-improving services. Paul Chaney writes on Social Commerce Today explaining that Gigya “provides…tools that: enable social registration to unify user identities, drive word of mouth traffic…and power social engagement to deepen relationships with existing customers.” Additionally, Gigya has an excellent analytics interface so clients can track the effect of social media on ROI.
Gigya separates its services into three primary areas: User management, social plugins, and gamification.
User Management 360
User management has seen a lot of recent upgrades and improvements. Launched in late 2012, Gigya’s User Management 360 provides new services to clients. The first is, as Jonathan Allen writes for Search Engine Watch, “Registration-as-a-service (RaaS) which allows anyone to create registration pages within minutes.” This makes registration and user interaction easier and quicker for your website.
Second, Identity Access “allows marketers to query a users complete activity profile on your site.” They get access to what the user has shared and how active they have been in expanding your social media presence. This is important when designing gamification strategies for your users.
Third, the final change to user management is improvements to how Gigya handles social logins to ensure they are “in compliance with social network policies.” This entire system is automated; whether someone downloads their own activity or deletes their account, Gigya keeps track.
These changes to User Management 360 enable Gigya users to take “IT departments out of the equation and gives marketers direct access to [a] treasure-trove of user data.” With permission from the users, of course.
Social Plugins
Gigya brings together a wide variety of social plugins that you can use on your site. They can help you manage your own social media accounts, offering a “write-once, connect-to-all” interface, as Robin Wilding writes.
They offer any customer or user an easy way to sign in and interact simply through social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook. Gigya makes it easy with social plugins for people to share however they interact with your products or brand on multiple social media platforms. It’s easy, as Robin writes, because Gigya offers “one-click sharing, multiple network sharing, action-based triggers for videos [and] comments” and “automatic link shortening” to help people share info no matter the character limit.
On top of all of this, Gigya has an excellent analytics offering. Their services gather data from all over the web and its programs. Gigya aggregates information from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and more. You have access to over 20 reports to analyze user data and enhance your social media engagement.
Gamification
In an effort to encourage more user participation, Gigya also provides a fully customizable suite of gamification options for sites using their service. The CEM blog has multiple posts about gamification and how effective it can be for you (some of the latest ones can be found here if you’re interested).
Providing the ability for companies to integrate gamification into their social interaction is the cherry on top of all of Gigya’s services. The gamification tools are integrated throughout all of Gigya’s services and have their own analytics, and plug-and-play options for setting up and monitoring exactly how you want to utilize gamification.
Why Gigya Can Help Your Business
One of the most convincing facts I read about when researching Gigya is a perfect example of this; it came from Rip Empson at TechCrunch. Based on some recent data, much of which was culled from Gigya’s analytics, it turns out that “users spend 50 percent more time on sites when they’re logging in through social networks.” This stat also applies to page views as well. Users who use a social network login “view twice the amount of pages.”
Those are convincing numbers. The longer someone spends on a website, the bigger chance they have of becoming a conversion or at least sharing information on social networks. Be sure to check out the TechCrunch link to see a well-made infographic by Gigya summarizing all of their data.
Gigya is used by hundreds of the biggest companies and businesses on the web. Its services are scalable and they might be exactly what your business needs to get the most out of a social media presence.
If you use Gigya, what do you think about it? Do you think you need services like Gigya to get the most out of social media?