Facebook low in customer satisfaction, while Pinterest ranks high, survey says

By Brandon Bailey

San Jose Mercury News

Pinterest users have a high rate of customer satisfaction, according to a new survey by an independent research group. Facebook and LinkedIn users? Not so much.
Ads and privacy are big concerns cited by Internet users who ranked Facebook and LinkedIn lowest among social media sites, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, an economic research program affiliated with the University of Michigan.
The rankings are based on a survey of 6,200 Internet users conducted in May — which, the survey group notes, was before Facebook ran into fresh criticism for a controversial study in which it tested users' emotional reactions to change in their news feeds.
Social media companies received somewhat higher marks than they did last year, as a group, but they still rank pretty low for customer satisfaction when compared with other industries, according to the researchers, who said only airlines, cable TV companies and Internet service providers ranked lower in 2014.
It's hard to know what to make of the findings: While the ACSI says customer satisfaction correlates with a company's financial performance, Facebook has made a pretty good showing in earnings and stock performance this year. (It was scheduled to report second-quarter earnings Wednesday.) And as Pinterest continues to build up its relatively small ad business, it will be interesting to see if its satisfaction ranking changes.
Meanwhile, the ACSI reports that Google's search engine far outranks its competitors — including Bing, Yahoo and AOL — in the category of Internet portals and search engines. The ACSI said users like Google's format for presenting search results, on both desktop and mobile computer screens.