Facebook might be the most popular Web site in the United States, but it doesn’t seem like its users are very happy with it. According to the The 2010 American Consumer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report, the social networking titan managed to score 64 out of 100 points on the ACSI’s consumer satisfaction scale — and that ranking puts it in the bottom five percent of all the private sector companies the ACSI tracks, on the same tier as cable companies and airlines with consistently terrible consumer satisfaction rankings. In fact, Facebook got a lower satisfaction ranking than the Internal Revenue Service‘s e-filing service.
The ACSI E-Business Report is produced in partnership with ForeSee Results.
“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Foresee Results president and CEO Larry Freed, in a statement. “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.”
The results mark the first time the ACSI has measured consumer satisfaction with social media Web sites and services. Other social media sites included in the ACSI report were YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, and YouTube. Only MySpace ranked lower than Facebook (with a score of 63); Wikipedia ranked the best, with a consumer satisfaction score of 77 out of 100.
By way of comparison, cable giant Comcast managed to improve its ACSI ranking in 2010 to 61 points out of 100 amongst subscription television providers. AT&T Mobility managed to get a ACSI score of 69 points in 2010.
The report also looked at search engines, and found consumers’ satisfaction with Google has dropped 7 percent (dropping from a score of 86 in 2009 to 80 this year), but continues to lead the search engine market. Microsoft’s Bing managed a strong second-place debut with a consumer satisfaction score of 77.
Amongst news and information Web sites, Fox News debuted at the top of the measured sites, scoring a consumer satisfaction rating of 82 out of 100 points — the highest score any news site has ever received in the ACSI’s history.
The ACSI is a well-regarded effort to measure consumer satisfaction that got its start at the University of Michigan in the mid-1990s. The ACSI interviews about 70,000 American consumers a year about their satisfaction levels with business-to-consumer and government services.
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