Facebook: The 10th Most Hated Company In The US

By: EW News Desk Team   Date: 12 July 2011

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12 July 2011

Facebook may be the world’s most popular social media platform – with more than 750 million registered users, US$2 billion in annual revenues and even an award-winning movie based on its founders – yet for all the “like” buttons in the world, the company was listed among the most hated companies in America according to a recent Business Insider report.

The report, based on results provided by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI), ranked Facebook as the second “most-hated” social media company in America – behind MySpace – while placing it higher on the “most-hated” scale compared to financial institutions such as the Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

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“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results. “At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience. Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution.”

The issue with privacy and personal information protection has been the most common gripe among Facebook users. Although the company has refuted allegations of being a “spying machine”, the pervasive nature of its products and features have led to concern in the general public.

Consumers who were not turned off by features such as Facebook’s facial recognition technology, expressed dissatisfaction with the sudden introduction of new features, such as the news feed or the photo lightbox. Recently, Facebook also began shutting down thousands of applications on the site, without any prior warning for both the creators and the users.

As such, the company received a fairly low customer satisfaction rating – placing it alongside other “luminaries” from the airline and telecommunications industries.

The ASCI first began measuring customer satisfaction for social media websites in 2010.

“Social media has become too big to ignore, so we added it to our list of e-business measures,” said Claes Fornell, ACSI founder and professor of business at the University of Michigan. “We are quite surprised to find that satisfaction with the category defies its popularity.”

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