Americans Less Annoyed With Facebook Than Last Year, Still Dislike LinkedIn

Cats’ satisfaction ratings for Facebook were not evaluated. (Bob Avery)

Ordinary consumers aren’t really the customers of social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest: we’re their products, there to have our personal data and preferences sold to advertisers. Still, people will flee a site if they don’t like it, making it important for social media platforms to keep users on the site longer in order to please their real customers. That’s why the American Customer Satisfaction Index has tracked our happiness with these sites since 2010.

The big news story from this year’s results is the improvement of Facebook: they zoomed from a below-average to an above-average satisfaction score since last year. In 2014, Facebook and LinkedIn tied for the lowest score in the sector.

What accounts for the huge improvement–almost 12 points on a scale of 0 to 100–that Facebook has undergone in the last year? Mobile. Even your grandma is using Facebook from her iPad now when she clicks “like” on every single thing that you post to the social network, and customers seem to prefer the mobile experience.

LinkedIn, meanwhile, is still at the bottom of the pack. It’s probably not a coincidence that the company announced today, shortly after these ratings came out, that they’re going to dial back the amount of e-mail that they send to customers.

Paced by Facebook, Customer Satisfaction Up for Social-Media Sites [Wall Street Journal]