Survey: LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram are the most trusted social media platforms

Recently, Business Insider conducted a survey on more than 1,900 respondents to rank the best trustworthy digital app trending nowadays. The online survey took place from April 23 to May 16, 2019. The people on this online survey were asked to rank the seven major digital social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and Snapchat on the base of six categories of digital trust. The six categories of digital trust included Security, Legitimacy, Community, User Experience, Shareability, and Relevance to detect the social platforms most trustworthy among others.

The digital trust on these social platforms puts a very huge impact on customers to engage with brand ads on social networks. According to the survey, more than 75% of people engage with an ad on a social media platform based on its Legitimacy whereas more than 72% of people trust platforms which makes them feel safe to share and post whatever they feel like. More than 69% of users of digital platforms prefer a social network that protects their privacy and data and around 63% of people prefer digital apps that show them relevant ads.

More insight on the full rankings of the report

For the third time in three years, LinkedIn is still the number one most trusted social platform based on the online survey by Business Insider. But this time, two of the categories of digital trust were overtaken. LinkedIn is ranked the first in the three out of six categories of digital trust and ranked in the second place in the category of Shareability, User Experience, and Relevance. LinkedIn that was consistently ranked as the first social network in all digital trust categories was now overtaken by Pinterest on User Experience and by Instagram on the category of Relevance.


In the survey by Business Insider, Pinterest was included for the first time in this year and it outranked the majority of the social network platforms except for LinkedIn. Pinterest is ranked as the second most trustworthy platform and it also ranked as second in the categories where LinkedIn was ranked first. We don’t think that LinkedIn will be outranked so quickly as the professional's networking platform is improving its categories of Legitimacy and Community from the past years and tops other social networks based on security as well.

According to the survey, Facebook again ranked the last with worse results displayed on each category of digital trust. More than 82% people on this survey stated they slight or not at all trust the platform to protect their privacy and data and this is an increase in the respondents as compared to 79% who said the same last year.

Despite the fact that Instagram improved its categories of Shareability and Relevance, more people are annoyed by the digital ads on the app as compared to the last year survey. Instagram was ranked fourth in the category of Shareability in 2017 and 2019 but now it improved by ranking third this year.

LinkedIn ranks First for the third time in the annual Digital Trust report

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