Sponsorship Link
Despite having a membership of over 140 million in the United States, Facebook scored 64 points on a 100-point scale on the consumer experience front, according to a report based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index, developed by the University of Michigan’s business school.
Internet social media scored 70 points after being included in the index for the first time.
“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 professor of business at the University of Michigan. “We are quite surprised to find that satisfaction with the category defies its popularity.”
The report finds Facebook score in parallel to two low scoring categories such as airlines and cable companies.
The report attributes privacy concerns, frequent interface changes and commercialization and huge advertising as the reasons affecting the consumer experience on Facebook. For easy protection of their personal data by the users, the company simplified the privacy settings in May.
Must Read
Like us on Facebook
Facebook was able to gain advertisers and millions of new members though it faced many user complaints in this year.
“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.
The survey was conducted for four social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia and Google’s YouTube. While Wikipedia led the category with 77 points and YouTube got 73 points, MySpace fared below Facebook with 63 points.
“Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution,” he said.
“We haven’t reviewed the survey methodology in detail, but clearly we have room to improve,” Facebook said in a statement to Bloomberg.
In the Internet portal and search engine category, Google scored the highest with 80 points, down 7 percent compared with previous year.
“The drop for Google may be related to efforts to expand well beyond its core search engine business,” the report said.
Google was followed by Bing with 77 points and Yahoo scored 76 points. Though Google lost points in the latest survey, the search market is dominated to a large extent by the company with 70 percent whereas Yahoo and Bing have 15 percent and 10 percent respectively.
Twitter did not find a place in the survey as access to the site is spread across number of applications.
![Ash Wednesday: Faces of the Faithful [PHOTOS]](http://img.ibtimes.com/www/thumb/mainpage/237365-15095-ash-wednesday-faces-of-the-faithful-photos.jpg)
