Although Facebook is rapidly approaching 500 million members, a new survey indicates consumers aren’t too pleased with the social-networking site. According to an American Customer Satisfaction Index report, Facebook’s score fell well below rankings achieved by some of the world’s top portals, search engines, and online news sites.
Among the four social-media web sites added to the annual survey released Tuesday, Facebook came in third with a score of 64 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale and only one point higher than rival MySpace.
“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results, which supports the production of the ACSI report founded by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the web site, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience.”
Evolution Versus Revolution
Overall, the Internet social-media category generated an average ACSI score of 70, versus 77 for Internet portals and search engines, and 74 for Internet news and information. “Social media has become too big to ignore, so we added it to our list of e-business measures,” said Claes Fornell, ACSI founder and a professor of business at the university. “We are quite surprised to find that satisfaction with the [social-networking] category defies its popularity.”
Wikipedia led the social-networking category with an ACSI score of 77, followed by YouTube at 73. By contrast, Facebook and MySpace scored consumer satisfaction levels that were even lower than IRS e-filer web sites, researchers said.
What’s more, Facebook and MySpace ranked in the bottom five percent of all measured private-sector companies and in the same range as airlines and cable companies — two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction, Freed observed. “Compare…