Google+ trumps Facebook in customer satisfaction
Facebook may be more populous, but Google+ is better-liked.
That's the message from a new set of data released
Tuesday by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Google+, the 1-year-old
social network that pundits declared dead last year, ties Wikipedia at the top
of the list of social media sites, with a score of 78 out of 100.
Facebook is the least-liked social network on the list,
with a score of 61 on the group's ranking of e-businesses.
That's down nearly 8% from Facebook's previous ranking,
indicating a drop in popularity of the social network that is by far the
world's most populous, with more than 900 million active users. By contrast,
Google+ has about 150 million monthly active users.
"If Facebook doesn't feel the pressure to improve
customer satisfaction now, that may soon change," ForeSee's CEO, Larry
Freed, said in a news release. ForeSee is an analytics firm that partnered with
ACSI to create the report.
This was the first year Google+ was included in the
ranking, which is based on interviews with consumers. ACSI, which releases
monthly reports in a variety of business categories, says it interviews 70,000
people a year.
With a rating of 63, LinkedIn, another popular network,
barely scored higher than Facebook in terms of customer satisfaction in
Tuesday's report. YouTube, which is owned by Google, received a 73; Pinterest a
73; and Twitter a 64. (MySpace, in case you're wondering, isn't part of the
list anymore).
Some people who use Google+ weren't surprised by the
ranking.
"Makes sense," one user wrote in response to a
CNN question about the news. "I'm sure a lot of people use Facebook
because they genuinely love it, but a huge number are also using it because
they feel forced to -- because everyone else they know is using it, or they
think they need to have a business presence there. So there are many people
using Facebook on a regular basis who don't actually like it and have plenty to
complain about. Whereas the majority of people using Google+ regularly only
bother to do so because they really prefer it over other sites like Facebook."
ACSI says Google+ is strong in areas where Facebook is
weak.
"According to the report, Google+'s strong showing
is a result of an absence of traditional advertising and what is seen as a
superior mobile product," the group says in its news release.
"Google+'s strengths may be Facebook's weaknesses,
as users complain about ads and privacy concerns. However, the most frequent
complaints about Facebook are changes to its user interface, most recently the
introduction of the Timeline feature."
The index was founded at the University of Michigan and
gets support from ForeSee for its e-commerce and e-business rankings.
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