Social media networks are one of the worst performing companies in a recent survey conducted by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), with Facebook and LinkedIn regarded as the worst sites in the industry according to its users. To think that this current ranking of social media sites has proven much better when compared to last year’s survey, the survey says.
ACSI’s E-Business Report reveals social media is the fourth lowest-scoring category in terms of customer satisfaction with index at 71, next to airlines at 69, subscription TV at 65 and Internet service providers at 63.
“Even with improvements across the board, e-business—and social media in particular—doesn’t do well in terms of user satisfaction,” ACSI founder and chairman Claes Fornell says in a statement. “It is rare to see strong growth in an industry with such low customer satisfaction. However, several of the major players seem to have realized that their long-term prospects may be in jeopardy unless they do better.”
The culprit for the low rating? Advertising, says David VanAmburg, director at ACSI. He says it continues to strain customer experience in social media, though hard to tell as well if the users or customers are somehow getting used to the commercials or if the social media companies are able to balance advertising disruption with tweaks to user experience.
“I’m surprised at the movement at the bottom of the industry, but it remains to be seen if these scores can hold as social media continues to monetize its users,” VanAmburg says.
It turns out the apple of the eyes of social media consumers these days—and for the very first time—is Pinterest, a social bookmarking website that lets users pin interest for inspiration. Its ASCI score went up six percent to 76, thanks to its enhanced search functions and features, the report reveals.
Microblogging site Twitter is also up by six percent to an index of 69, with its users responding positively to the site’s enhanced integration of media files and an updated website design.
Recall that Facebook continues to face various controversies regarding its privacy and advertising system, of which the most recent was how it manipulated its users’ news feeds for a psychological experiment that tried to understand the effects of positive and negative posts to users. Users expressed outrage over the said experiment taking to social media sites their distaste for how the experiment was conducted without their consent.
Facebook, however, argued that there is no need to contact each involved user for consent because registering to the site already means giving consent to the company to conduct such researches to enhance user experience and for product development.
