The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) released reports measuring customer satisfaction for various industries. This year marked Social Media’s first time entering the index of measurements by the ACSI.
To everyone’s surprise, Social Media was the industry with one of the lowest scores in customer satisfaction. And it was even more surprising that Facebook and MySpace were the companies with the 2 lowest scores and appeared in the bottom 5% of all measured companies on and offline. Based on a survey by ForeSee Results, customers are most dissatisfied with privacy and security issues, constant interface changes, annoying notifications, advertisements, etc.
But Facebook has a following of 500 million! How can so many users be dissatisfied and still use it? Are Facebook users a bunch of unappreciative complainers? Or maybe they are just addicted…because Facebook truly can be addicting. 57% of its users visit Facebook every day.
Many other social media companies were measured, and you can view these results from the ACSI report.
Besides the finding that people hate Facebook, the biggest shocker was within the news results. FOXNews.com is the online news source with the most satisfied customers! FOXNews.com, with a score of 82, beat all of the other measured news sites like MSNBC.com who scored 74 and CNN.com who scored 73. Fox news reached the highest news score in 9 years!
So how did Fox do this?
Well, Fox News has always been known for their distinct and loyal audience. They are generally right winged, slightly older, and have a lower income and education level. And another key factor is that more than 63% of FOXNews.com users say that it is their primary source of news and information. MSNBC.com has 49% saying it’s their primary news source. USAToday.com has 39%. This is key because users of other news sites have multiple news sources, so they don’t rely on just one. Satisfaction is strongly influenced by expectation. When you have a lot of other sources to compare, you will find more reasons to become dissatisfied with one or another. If you are only watching Fox News and they are telling you what you want to hear and what you expect to hear, then you will be satisfied…right?
Fox News’s distinct audience of satisfied users is a target for marketers and advertisers. There is a relationship between visit frequency and likelihood to look at advertisements. The more often users visit a website, the more likely they are to click on one of those advertisements on the side panel. We know that the majority of FOXNews.com users are frequent users. We also know that these users classify a distinct audience–perfect for advertising. However, adding advertisements that target users can negatively affect their satisfaction. Look at what Facebook’s advertisements did to their user ratings. Commercializing a web site can run the risk of annoying and dissatisfying its users.
