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To trust or not to trust: Small business survey hails WordPress, dings Yelp - Greensboro - Triad Business Journal

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For small business owners, WordPress is a well-trusted company, Yelp is a brand in trouble, and Facebook is on a downward path. Those are some of the findings out today from a survey of 6,000 small business owners from the second half of 2015 conducted by Alignable, a two-year-old social network for local entrepreneurs.

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Alignable, which is headquartered in Boston and has members across the country, started doing its SMB Trust Index at the beginning of last year but this is the first time the company has released its findings to the public. To do its analysis, Alignable relied on the Net Promoter Score approach companies use to gauge their own customer loyalty.

"As you build trust, your net promoter score goes up," Alignable co-founder and CEO Eric Groves told the Business Journals. Groves went through the 25 national brands that made up the list, all representing companies, products and services that small business owners use. In keeping with the Net Promoter approach, each one was ranked on a scale of 0-10 with the companies then getting final scores with a maximum score of 100 for the most trust to negative 100 for the least trusted.

Check out the full ranking in the infographic below. Here are some of the results that Groves highlighted:

Most trusted: WordPress— The website creation tool had a NPS of 73 and the report determined that "WordPress proves 'free' doesn't always mean 'junk.'" Groves said he was surprised by how trusted WordPress was, which he attributed to its passionate following. "I knew it was a great platform, but I didn't know that their following was that ravenous."

Least trusted: Yelp— The San Francisco-based website that allows users to rate and review small businesses was itself poorly ranked. It had an NPS of -66. "The problem is, the majority of small business owners feel like they're held captive to a certain extent by Yelp," Groves said, noting that restaurants tend to view Yelp more favorably than other businesses. "What this score says is that there are lot more people with a negative trust factor of Yelp than a positive factor."

Falling: Facebook— Even though the Alignable survey is still relatively new, one company that's seeing a progressive downward trend is the world's largest social network, which has an NPS of 24. Groves attributed the drop to a change Facebook did at the start of 2015 that caused posts by small businesses to drop from their customer's feeds unless the businesses paid to promote them. "They flipped from being an engagement platform to a media outlet and they did it without really helping small businesses understand why they were making a transition, and they really didn't take them along for a ride in a very nice way," Groves said.

For more details about the report, see the results below and check out Alignable.

J. "Josh" Jennings Moss has spent time on the police beat in Florida, on the political trail in Washington, D.C., and on the business front in New York. Among the places he's journalized: Condé Nast Portfolio, FoxNews.com, ABCNews.com, the Advocate, the Washington Times, and the Tampa Tribune. Josh graduated from the University of Arizona and lives in New York City.

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Source: To trust or not to trust: Small business survey hails WordPress, dings Yelp