Why Facebook User Satisfaction Tanked

Ever since the beginning of Google+ in the June of last year, the social media world had a good laugh in its supposed inferiority to Facebook. Most thought it was just going to be one of Google’s many temporary experiments that may have stuck around but would have been forgotten about.

The size of the social network is at about 250 million people as of June this year. It does not measure up to the 900 million on Facebook, but a new study shows it may not be about the number of people on the networks, but the number of people that are satisfied.

Just this week, the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported in their study that Facebook scored a less-than-impressive score of 61 out of 100 in terms of customer satisfaction. This dropped from the score it had last year by eight percent, according to CNN Tech and other sources. In fact, of all the social networked that were studied, Facebook ranked last in all of them.

For the contending Google+, the story was quite different. Even though there are no scores to compare to from last year, the social network got a 78, which would tie with Wikipedia. According to a source from CNBC, ”sites like Google+ are newer and have had the advantage to pick up where Facebook had left off.

For Google+, the benefit of starting small compared to Facebook is that they can learn from the mistakes of the giant instead of doing so themselves.

There are plenty of factors that can explain this surprising turnout for Google+ versus Facebook. For one, Facebook lost a lot of fans (not users) this past year with the launch of Timeline. Another source from CNBC made a strong point that people like to see their Facebook in a linear order, which Timeline more-or-less jumbled around a little bit. The frequent change to Facebook’s interface inevitably leads to users devoting one of their statuses concern how annoyed they are by having to adjust again.

The pervasive use of advertising on Facebook played a big role as well, and comparing the two networks, Google+ luckily has not been as frivolous with ads as Facebook – yet at least.

Along with this, the drop could have been because of the increased concern with Facebook and security over the year. The social network has been gaining more and more scrutiny with how much users are getting their information get out. The whole fiasco with employers asking for Facebook passwords probably didn’t help much with the overall brand of the network either.

So what can be picked up on this? For one, perhaps marketers and the general public should not be so quick to dismiss Google+ as the widely-termed “ghost town”. There is certainly a benefit to be gained from getting more use of out Google+ - for now it is pretty untainted with the same issues that Facebook is facing. With a growing audience going there, it may be worth the time to draw up some plans for reaching out to them.

It will be interesting to see how Google+ reacts to their newly acquired confidence by customers. As long as they remains empirical of Facebook, they could be growing more in popularity faster than we thought.