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

NEW YORK—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.

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."

J Jennings Moss Editor, Upstart and New York Business Journal Email

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.

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