Brand-Centric Google+ Pages Gaining Ground on Facebook

77 Percent of Top 100 Brands Now Have Google+ Pages, Up From 61 Percent Last Month

San Mateo, Calif - December 21, 2011 - BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today released analysis showing that Google+ page creation amongst the world.s top 100 brands jumped in the last month from 61 percent to 77 percent (93 percent of top 100 brands are on Facebook), while the number of people in circles increased over 50 percent from 147k to 222k.

It is still early days as top 100 brands determine how best to establish a Google+ presence, while continuing to attract more people in circles. Google continues to have the largest fan contingent of any brand with more than 77k fans, up from 65k just one month before. Brands like Starbucks nearly quadrupled their social followers in the last month and H&M and Pepsi broke into 20k plus people in circles, which is still 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 top 100 brands, showed a collective total of almost 300 million Facebook fans for these top brands, compared to approximately 148k Google+ followers for these same brands.

"Google is embedding their popular new product with its dominant search marketing position, replicating the tie between social and search channels, just as Facebook.s Open Graph tied sites and search together earlier this year, blurring the lines between social and search engagement," said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. "Top 100 brands are realizing that they now need to address both channels. Now the real work begins, if they want to extend their social presence on the Web from Facebook to the new Google+."

To learn more about the Google+ analysis, please visit BrightEdge SocialShare to view and download the full report here.