Customer satisfaction declining for Facebook, Twitter

Washington, July 28

People view Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn more negatively than in the past, according to a new study which found that customer satisfaction for some of the largest social media sites is dropping.

Facebook and Twitter, saw the largest declines in customer satisfaction - 9 per cent and 8 per cent respectively.

Those declines are driven in part by the presence of advertising on services that are still regarded as 'free', researchers said.

"Consumers have not fully accepted advertising as a necessary cost for online services they have come to expect as free," said Claes Fornell, chairman of American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ASCI), which tracks opinions of search engines, news outlets, social media sites and other e-businesses.

For Facebook, a controversy over 'curated' news may also have contributed to diminishing satisfaction for users.

Even minor tweaks to a social platform's algorithm can spark anger among millions of users who may regularly rely on the sites for news and information, 'bizjournals.com' reported.

"It's impossible for global brands with massive user bases to like Facebook and Twitter to keep everyone happy," said David VanAmburg, managing director at ACSI.

Twitter angered many users when it tweaked its newsfeed from a chronological system to a new algorithm based around relevancy.

LinkedIn's score also dropped by 4 per cent. The professional networking site does not serve as many ads as Facebook and Twitter, instead relying on premium accounts for revenue.

However, users may be turned off by email spam about paid accounts and requests from unknown people, researchers found. — PTI