Brands on Google+ are growing followers like crazy. A new report from BrightEdge, the SEO and digital marketing startup, indicates that the number of users following the top 100 brands on Google has increased 1400 percent, from 220,000 in December to 3.1 million in February.
Indeed, H&M, the top brand on the social network, now boasts more than 462,000 followers, more than twice the number held by all 100 brands in December. Coca Cola saw an increase of 187 times, leaping from 1,800 to 336,000.
Most of the growth occurred in the top 10 brands which hold 10 times as many followers as brands 11 to 100 combined.
While Google has nearly seven million likes on Facebook, it only has 194,000 on its Google+ page. For the first time, Google was not the most followed brand on Google+, and has now been surpassed by eight other brands.
The report did note that several noted brands continue to ignore Google+, including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Life and Apple.
“With search + your world driving continued visibility of Google+ we expect to see continued
consumer adoption of Google+, but expect brand adoption to stay relatively constant,” the report concluded. “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.”
And while brands may be amassing followers, it still remains to be seen if those followers are actually using the site, or simply signing on and moving on with their lives. Though Google recently released a figure stating that over 60 percent of Google+ users engage with their products daily, and 80 percent weekly, Forbes pointed out that the company referred specifically to Google’s products, an altogether different animal considering one simple keyword counts as a use of a Google product.