77 Of Top 100 Brands Now Have Google+ Pages

The biggest brands in the world are adopting Google+ at a quick rate, to the point that Google+ pages are beginning to close the gap with Facebook pages. But with Facebook pages having been around much longer, brands still have exponentially more fans there than they have followers on Google+.

According to BrightEdge’s December SocialShare report, 77 of the top 100 brands now have Google+ pages — a 26% rise from the 61 brands that had pages a month earlier. Google+ is catching up to Facebook, where 93 of the top 100 brands have pages.

The numbers are particularly impressive when you consider that Google launched Google+ pages for business on November 7th — about six weeks ago. Facebook launched “Like Pages” way back in November 2007, so it has an almost four-year head start on Google+.

BrightEdge also reports that these big brands were able to attract a lot of new followers in just the past 30 days. Those 77 brands have about 222,000 total Google+ followers, a 51% increase over the past month. For the sake of comparison, BrightEdge estimates that the top 100 brands have more than 300 million combined fans on Facebook.

Google continues to have the most popular page on Google+ with its current total of more than 91,000 followers. YouTube is close with about 75,000 followers. But keep an eye on Starbucks: BrightEdge says the company almost quadrupled its Google+ followers in the past month. It has about 38,000 followers.

These numbers don’t include individual Google+ profiles, just formal business pages. All of the brands mentioned above pale in comparison to the queen of Google+, Britney Spears, who recently became the first user with more than a million followers.