Dissatisfied Facebook users may find future friend in Google+

(2011 Google)

Many Facebook users are not satisfied with the social network, which could spell trouble for the 750-million strong company now that popular rival Google+ is on the scene.

According to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Facebook has an index of 66 - a rating that not only puts the company at the bottom of the rung in the report's social networking category but also makes it the lowest-scoring site of all measured companies.

The survey was conducted in June by ACSI in partnership with customer experience analytics firm ForeSee Results, before Google launched its Google+ service. Despite Google+ not featuring in the survey, ForeSee believes the social network could easily siphon off Facebook's disgruntled users.

"We don't know yet how Google+ will fare, but what we do know is that Google is one of the highest-scoring companies in the ACSI and Facebook is one of the lowest," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results. "An existing dominance of market share like Facebook has is no longer a safety net for a company that is not providing a superior customer experience."

User-contributed online encyclopedia Wikipedia takes the top spot in ACSI’s Social Media category with an index of 78. YouTube is second with 74.

Google is king when it comes to the Search Engine and Portals category, jumping up 4 percent from last year's rating to 83. Microsoft's Bing is not far behind (82) and has made impressive gains in consumer satisfaction, jumping up 7 percent since 2010.

"Anything over 80 is generally considered an excellent score," notes the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Google+ has reportedly hit 18 million users in just a few short weeks of launching.

"The viral growth of Google+ has slowed somewhat over the past few days," said self-proclaimed unofficial statistician and Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen, "but my new-and-improved 1,000 surname model shows that more than 750,000 people joined the site on Monday, bringing the total user base to just under 18 million."

In the first 24 hours of launching in Apple’s App Store, Google's Google+ iPhone app shot to the top of the US-based free apps list ,and it continues its reign at the top.

While recent statistics from Experian Hitwise show that Google+ had around 1.8 million US-based visitors last week, rival social network Facebook had more than ten times that figure.

http://www.theacsi.org/