Google+: Brands Rush In Where Consumers Fear To Tread

Earlier this week BrightEdge released data on early adoption of Google+ pages by brands. It also offered a comparison with Facebook. The SEO firm said that 61 percent of the top 100 brands in the US have Google+ Pages, in the little over a week since the doors were officially opened. By contrast 93 percent […]

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Screen Shot 2011 11 18 At 5.59.35 AM1Earlier this week BrightEdge released data on early adoption of Google+ pages by brands. It also offered a comparison with Facebook. The SEO firm said that 61 percent of the top 100 brands in the US have Google+ Pages, in the little over a week since the doors were officially opened. By contrast 93 percent of that same top 100 have Facebook pages.

The Google+ adoption numbers are impressive. Indeed, given the possibility that Google+ may turn into a major new social platform brands want to quickly establish themselves on it. So far, however, there isn’t that much follower action, according to the BrightEdge report:

Not surprisingly, Google had the largest fan contingent of any brand on Google+, having attracted more than 65,000 fans. In these early days of Google+ Pages, top consumer brand stalwarts like Coke, McDonalds and Verizon had only dozens of fans, all just a shadow of the millions of Facebook fans these brands have already connected with.

BrightEdge said that “no brand other than Google had more than 50,000 Google+ fans,” while more than “two dozen of the top 100 brands have over 1M fans on Facebook.”

Ford is something of a case-in-point. It was one of the earliest adopters of Google+. The company was part of the initial wave of entities that set up +Pages before they were officially allowed. It has 27,535 fans on Google+. On Facebook it has nearly 5 million.

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I much prefer the look and feel of the Ford page on Google+; it’s “cleaner” and even more “branded” in a way than on Facebook. Facebook was lauded for being “cleaner” than MySpace in its early days but now Facebook has become very cluttered. (I’ve excluded that clutter [the right columns] from the screen shot above.)

Another reason that brands and their agencies have raced in to Google+ is because of the potential future SEO value of participating in Google+. In addition, video chat feature Hangouts offers a unique way to connect with fans/followers vs. Facebook and Twitter.

If the fans/followers/plusers don’t come all this will be relatively moot however.

It’s not clear whether Google+ is gaining or fading. Hitwise recently released data showing that Google+ just had its “third biggest week since launch.” That suggests new momentum.

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There are others, however, who believe the recent bump masks a larger stagnation that presages the inevitable failure of Google+. Tech bloggers and journalists seem increasingly prone to snap judgments and hyperbole these days. It’s way too early to call Google+ a failure. However it does face a struggle to justify itself to consumers who otherwise appear relatively happy with Facebook.

Yet brands and agencies will continue to use Google+ in an effort to get “+1s” and because Google is indexing Google+ pages. New brand and business activity on Google+ may in turn create more consumer interested and engagement — especially if companies offer incentives to +1 them, as they frequently do on Facebook.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

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