More than 60% of the world's biggest brands now have a presence on Google+, but the fledgling social network has a "long way to go" to match Facebook's status, a study has argued.
BrightEdge, the digital services provider, assessed the 100 brands featured in the latest edition of Millward Brown's annual ranking of the most valuable intangible assets globally.
Overall, it reported that 61% of this group were active on Google+ less than a week after corporate members received permission to join the new platform.
"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.
As evidence of this, only 12% of leading brands had added a link to their Google+ profiles to official website homepages, potentially a major driver of traffic and visibility.
By contrast, 94% of the brands analysed had created pages on Facebook, and 53% had inserted a button on the opening screen of their main online portal directing visitors towards this destination.
Google itself boasts the largest number of fans on Google+, on roughly 65,000, but the more common experience, as shown by Coca-Cola, Verizon and McDonald's, was possessing "dozens" of followers.
Indeed, around a quarter of the brands monitored had failed to sign up a single fan on Google+ at the time the research was conducted, whereas most have thousands, and often millions, on Facebook.
Moreover, when combining the cumulative amount of followers secured by the top 100 brands across the two competing sites, figures stood at 148,000 for Google+, and 300m on Facebook.
"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+," said Yu.
"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."
One area Google+ has a clear advantage, however, is regarding search, with the average brand page appearing in twelfth position in Google's search results, versus thirteenth or fourteenth for Facebook.
Data sourced from BrightEdge; additional content by Warc staff
New York - 21 November 2011
|
