61 Percent of World’s Top Brands Create Google+ Pages in One Week

Even Biggest Brands Attract Fewer than 150,000 Google+ Followers in First Week, Compared to 300 Million Facebook Fans They’ve Already Established

San Mateo, Calif – November 16, 2011 – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today released an analysis that shows almost two-thirds, or 61 percent, of the world’s Top 100 brands had pages on Google+ less than a week after the search company allowed them but only about 13 percent of the brands that created these pages displayed a link to them on their home page, a major factor in driving traffic and visibility for the new social web presence.

In this early phase of a Google+ presence, brands appeared to be having mixed success at building social networks around their Google+ presence. In fact, Google had the largest fan contingent of any brand on Google+, having attracted more than 65,000 fans. But other consumer brand stalwarts like Coke, McDonalds and Verizon had only dozens of fans, all just a shadow of the millions of Facebook fans these brands have already connected with. In fact, a review of Facebook and Google+ properties for all 100 brands showed a collective total of almost 300 million Facebook fans for these top brands, compared to approximately 148,000 Google+ followers for these same brands.

“Brands have been quick to embrace a presence on Google+, but clearly there is a long way to go in establishing social networks that really have scale and deep user engagement,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Now the real work begins for these brands if they want to extend their social presence on the Web from Facebook to the new Google+. And it will be interesting to see how these communication and marketing channels will grow in a way that remains meaningful for the world’s top brands.”

The BrightEdge analysis showed that 94 percent of the Top 100 brands have a presence on Facebook.

And while brands appeared to be quick to adopt a Google+ page, they were somewhat slow to embed on their home page any kind of link to the Google+ page. Only 12 percent of brands that had opened a Google+ page were displaying a link to it on their home page. About 53 percent of the Top 100 brands display a link on their home page to their Facebook page.

For any brand, Google search will remain a primary means for consumer discovery. And Google+ appears to be getting very good ranking despite being in its early stages. BrightEdge's analytics showed Google+ pages on average appeared in the top 12 Google search results for the corresponding brand, while the brand’s Facebook pages on average appeared in the top 13 or 14 listed results.

Only one Top 100 global brand, Marlboro, has no social media presence on either Facebook or Goolge+. To learn more about the Google+ analysis, please visit BrightEdge SocialShare to view and download the full report.