Will Pinterest and Google beat out Facebook as the leading social provider?

Emma Tzeng is a marketing writer at Gigya.

Over a billion consumers across the globe use Facebook to stay connected to friends, follow their favorite brands and celebrities, share photographs and status updates, and more. What most of this status-updating, photo-sharing population probably doesn’t realize, however, is that the social network is also the top social login provider of choice across over 700 leading brands’ web properties.

Social login enables users to create accounts and sign in to websites and mobile apps using their existing social profiles, which facilitates an easier registration and login process while giving businesses an opportunity to capture permission-based social data on their customers.

It also provides a way for competing social networks to challenge Facebook, without going up against it directly as a social destination.

Facebook still has a strong lead

A recent Gigya study reveals that while Facebook continues to hold the dominant market share as the leading social login provider, Google and Pinterest are quickly following suit. More specifically, 52 percent of social logins are performed using a Facebook account, while 24 percent of these logins occur using Google+, up from just 12 percent in 2011. Furthermore, in the e-commerce sphere, sharing across Pinterest beats out Facebook, with 41 percent of shares happening through Pinterest compared to 37 percent of shares through Facebook.

As Google and Pinterest continue to establish themselves as social login leaders, we’ll explore some possible reasons behind the steady growth of these social networks.

Google touches nearly everything

To nobody’s surprise, Google’s reach is astronomical — and it’s only continuing to grow.

Simply put, users’ Google accounts are integrated into such a large product suite that it’s very likely that every Google account holder uses multiple Google products, including email (Gmail), web browser (Chrome), personal calendar (Google Calendar), and more. Not to mention, Google continues to roll out new products on a regular basis, such as its new Google Wallet, which integrates seamlessly with other products in its suite to allow users to manage and perform online payments quickly, easily, and securely.

As Google evolves its product offerings and more users continue to use Google products, we can expect to see an incremental growth in these social logins.

Pinterest’s user base proves invaluable to business

Pinterest, now worth an estimated $2.5 billion and reportedly the third most-visited social network after Facebook and Twitter, is an e-commerce business’s dream. It’s perhaps the only place on the web that consumers enthusiastically and openly share their most coveted material desires.

Recently, Pinterest released Rich Pins, making it even easier for pinners to make purchases for items they find through the social network. Rich Pins essentially let businesses attach price tags and link directly to the products, allowing for quicker, easier product discovery and purchases.

A more level social landscape to come

While no one can doubt Facebook’s obvious dominance in the social login market, it’s just as evident that other social login providers like Pinterest and Google may very well assume their place as a worthy contender in the near future. As these social networks continue to roll out new product features and grow their user bases, we can expect to see the social login landscape even out more and more.

See the full infographic below.

Emma Tzeng (@emmatzeng) runs content strategy and production at Gigya. When she isn’t blogging, she can be found hiking the hills of San Francisco, eating an inordinate amount of ice cream, or documenting her travels. She can be reached at emma@gigya.com.

Editor’s note: This post was the winner of the recent Viralheat Blogathon, where a panel of three judges, including VentureBeat’s Dylan Tweney, selected it from among dozens of entries.