More brands take to Google+

NEW YORK: More than 70% of the world's biggest brands are now present on Google+, the social network, with H&M, Toyota and Red Bull attracting the highest numbers of followers.

BrightEdge, the online solutions group, reported that 75 of the 100 most valuable global brands are active on this platform, with Visa, the financial services giant, Wells Fargo, the bank, and Hermes, from the luxury sector, among the latest additions.

Currently, however, Google+ lags behind Facebook, where 90% of the same brands have established official pages, and Twitter, where this total stands at 80%, but the gap is closing.

H&M, the fast fashion chain, has the most Google+ followers, on 1.3m, beating Toyota, the carmaker, on 1.1m. These two players have both recently broken into six figures on this metric.

Google itself took third place on 968k, with Red Bull, the energy drink, registering 964k. Three auto manufacturers came next, in the form of BMW on 948k, Nissan on 939k and Mercedes-Benz on 917k.

Samsung, the electronics firm, logged 771k here, ahead of Porsche on 749k and Starbucks on 572k. Together, the top ten brands had 9.2m fans, three times the amount recorded by the next 90 brands, a decline from the ten-fold difference in February.

The top 100 brands had 12.2m followers in July, a 54% increase in just two months. Toyota, for example, enjoyed an improvement from 602k fans in this period, with Red Bull up from 698k.

Only 20% of brands with a Google+ page link to it from their main website. Honda, another carmaker, and Starbucks, the coffee chain, all added these tools since the last research round, as did Hermes and Samsung.

Elsewhere, the analysis revealed the proportion of active brands which saw their Google+ accounts appearing in search results has grown from 6% to 30% over the year to date.

Accenture, the consultancy, GE, the conglomerate, eBay, the ecommerce site and FedEx, the delivery firm, were some members from this group, alongside H&M, Google and Toyota.

"The exponential increase in Google+ pages showing up in search results means consumers are starting to engage with brands more regularly on the platform and vice versa," said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge.

Data sourced from BrightEdge; additional content by Warc staff, 1 August 2012

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