Followers for the top 100 brands on Google+ have grown by over 1 400% in the past month, according to data from digital marketing agency BrightEdge Technologies.
BrightEdge says this month the number of people following/in circles of the top 100 brands went from 222 000 to over 3.1 million. The majority of the growth was limited to the top 10 brands, however, which collectively account for over three million followers.
Top brand pages on the fledgling social platform include H&M (462 000 followers), Samsung (372 000) and Coca Cola (which saw a 187% increase, from 1 800 to 336 000 followers).
Interestingly, Google itself has over seven million “likes” on Facebook, but only 194 000 followers on its Google+ page.
“While the majority of top 100 brands that have adopted Facebook pages also have Google+ pages, notable brands have sat in the sidelines for Google+,” says BrightEdge, adding that notable laggards include Microsoft and Apple.
BrightEdge says it expects to see continued visibility of Google+ through the new Search Plus Your World algorithm, which will lead to continued consumer adoption of the social platform.
“Most of the brands that will adopt and focus on Google+ pages appear to have done so; the next challenge for Google is adding followers. Google+ still has less than 1/100th the number of total consumers interacting with the top 100 brands that Facebook has.”
In context
Latest figures from Google placed Google+'s overall user base at over 90 million. Following the platform's public launch in September last year (after a three-month closed beta trial), Google added brand pages to the service in November.
Figures show Google+ is currently dominated by male users who account for about 67% of the user base. Data from Website Monitoring also shows the service is most popular among students and software engineers.
By contrast, the other rapidly growing new social service, Pinterest, reportedly has a 97% female user base (and 10.4 million users in total). The social pin-boarding site is also reportedly driving more referral traffic than Google+. Brands are also warming up to the service and increasingly trying to leverage the interest-graph to push their products.
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