Twitter Still Isn’t the Social Network We Love to Hate Most
An American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) study finds YouTube ranks highest for user satisfaction, while LinkedIn makes the biggest gain.
By Rob Pegoraro, PC Magazine
July 25, 2023
After all of Twitter’s self-inflicted wounds over the last nine months, the remaining employees at the service that is now rebranding itself to “X” can console themselves with this data point: People still hate Facebook a little more.
That comes from a new survey released Tuesday(Opens in a new window) by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which finds that Meta’s flagship platform ranks last in user satisfaction in the social-media category with a score of 66 out of 100. That represents a substantial improvement over Facebook’s dismal score of 62 in last year’s survey but still leaves it behind Twitter and Reddit, which tie for second-to-last place with scores of 69.
Google’s YouTube, meanwhile, leads this category with a score of 78, which the ACSI press release credits to that video hub’s “mobile app quality and reliability, ease of navigation, loading speed and reliability, and ease of use on different devices.”
Pinterest and TikTok tie for second place with scores of 77, with the latter improving notably from last year’s score of 73 despite continued concerns over its privacy and security as well as the trustworthiness of its Chinese parent firm ByteDance.
Most-improved honors go to Microsoft’s LinkedIn, with the business-networking site vaulting to a score of 75 from last year’s 68. Meta’s Instagram gains almost as much, climbing to 73 from the previous score of 67.
User satisfaction with the entire social-media category, meanwhile, climbs from 71 to 73.
“Last year, the top three companies were within 3 points of each other,” the ACSI release quotes Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and director of research emeritus at the ACSI. “This year, they’re all within 1 point of each other— and they’re all higher than last year’s winner.”
The same release, however, suggests that the worst is yet to come with Twitter–er, X. The ACSI’s announcement notes “signs of score deterioration emerging,” fueled by such recent downgrades as Twitter charging for account verification and imposing rate limits capping how many tweets people can view in a day.
This ACSI survey, based on an email survey of 7,979 randomly selected customers quizzed “between July 2022 and June 2023,” does not mention such Twitter alternatives as the federated platform Mastodon, Meta’s Threads, or TikTok’s just-launched “text posts” feature.
Need a Twitter Alternative? Try Mastodon or One of These Other Social Media Networks
The ACSI survey also ranks search engines, and in that category Google comes in first with a score of 80, up notably from last year’s 75. (If you’re looking at that number and thinking of how many search ads you had to scroll past to see an “organic” result on Google: We hear you.) The privacy-optimized search site DuckDuckGo finishes just behind at 79 in its first appearance in an ACSI survey.
AOL (we know…) and Bing tie at 75, while Yahoo is in last place at 74–which would still rank it comfortably above Facebook and Twitter in the hearts of ACSI respondents.
The closeness of this numbers understates how thoroughly Google continues to dominate search, despite a change in search settings being only a few clicks away in browsers. One promising Google alternative, Neeva, ran up the white flag in May when that company announced a pivot to focusing on AI services, while Microsoft’s extensive and sometimes tacky promotion of Bing hasn’t changed things much in its favor.
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