A new report by Bright Edge SocialShare has revealed that there has been a 1,400 per cent growth of Google+ brand page fans since December 2011. Brands pages were only introduced on Google+ a few months ago, and we reported back in November on how some of the brands did not seem to be faring too well on the site, with limited interaction taking place on them.
The report states that the number of people following/in circles with the top one hundred brands on Google+ grew from 222,000 to 3.1 million, with the majority of this growth happening among the top ten brands. Which all sounds great, but we must bear in mind the latest figures which showed that 67 per cent of users on Google+ are male, and that the most popular occupation on the site is student, which limits the demographics that brands can target.
On top of this, it’s important to bear in mind that the growth in numbers still comes no where near the number of fans on Facebook, as the report by Bright Edge points out “Google+ still has less than 1/100th the number of total consumers interacting with the top 100 brands that Facebook has.”
Fast growth, but no brand hits the One Million mark
No brand on Google+ has over one million followers, which is small fry compared to the millions of fans some of the biggest brands have on Facebook and Twitter. H&M currently have the most Google+ followers, 534, 939, which is just a fraction of their Facebook page which has almost ten million likes. However, the Google+ figure is closer to the number of followers they have on Twitter, which currently stands at 806, 017.
H&M’s number of followers on Twitter and on Google+ are both under one million, which suggests that in this case, both Twitter and Google+ are in a similar playing field, but Facebook is in a league of its own for brand interaction. If brand fans are evenly distributed across social networks, it seems likely that brands will spend the same amount of time and energy on developing all their brand pages.
No explanation is offered by the report as to why there has been such fast growth over the past month, so it will be interesting to see if this growth trend will continue, given that a number of major brands – such as Microsoft and Apple – have yet to join the network.