A number of major media companies are starting to implement tools for third-party authentication for consumers. We spoke with JanRain, which provides a tool called Engage that companies like Tribune Interactive, Meredith, E.W. Scripps, The Dallas Morning News, bizjournals, and the National Geographic Society are all using. With the solution, publishers can authenticate users via third-party logins using as many as 16 different providers, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo LinkedIn, etc.

"JanRain is helping these companies to garner traffic to their site via the social web," a representative for the company tells WebProNews. She also says Engage can let media companies "allow consumers to publish content back to the social networks, increasing the cycle of referral traffic, and capture important demographic data to improve the user experience."

"Traffic to your website from a social media platform is, by its very nature, more valuable than traffic from other sources," she adds. "People spend time on social networks for the purpose of sharing information with people they deem important. Trust is high among peers; recommendations and messages exchanged among friends are more likely to resonate than those directly from a company."

"A goal for any site is to have a visitor login or register, becoming an engaged user and interacting more – making a purchase, posting content, etc. Once a user is engaged, make it easy for them to communicate back to the social networks of their choice without leaving your site," she continues. "Activity-based social publishing tools enable the user to perform this action from within the flow of your website experience. A user finds something of interest on your website and then calls it out to their community."

"The engaged user is an effective filter both for their community and your website.  When a user decides to share information back to a social network, it is a win for their contacts and your organization," she concludes. "The circle of referral traffic begins.  As the user shares their activity or content from your site to friends on a social network, the post from the initial engaged user drives traffic back to your site, some of whom will login and publish their own activities back to their networks, and so on.  Many organizations leveraging this functionality are experiencing 6-25 new referral visitors for each social action a user shares with friends.  As this cycle repeats, these organizations create a direct link to the social web and a sustaining stream of new referred visitors."

In another article, we compared the value of social interactions with content through social networks to comments on the content themselves. There is no question that the social networks can provide additional value. Read that here.