More top brands have created Google+ Pages recently, with BrightEdge reporting 75 of the top 100 brands maintain pages even as user activity remains stagnant.

A report from BrightEdge found that Google+ is attracting more top brands to its network, with 75 of the top 100 U.S. businesses maintaining presences on the site. However, only 15 million Google+ users have placed one of these companies in a Circle, compared with 481 million Facebook users who have Liked at least one brand.

Google+ still trails Facebook and Twitter, as 90 percent and 80 percent of top brands use these networks, respectively. According to BrightEdge, one of the main advantages companies using Google+ for social media marketing have is the additional SEO lift provided by Google’s social network.

While any platform offers some SEO value due to increased inbound links and visibility, Google+ has a greater impact due to Google’s integration of social data into search rankings. Brafton has long reported that +1s have some weight as a ranking signal for logged in users, and new updates integrating the network with search continue to evolve. For example, the company recently announced a pair of adjustments that help users share content from Google SERPs directly to their Google+ accounts and monitor trending Google+ activity from SERPs.

As Google+ continues to attract more marketers, it has also grown in terms of general consumer activity. At Google I/O, the company announced its network had surpassed the 250 million-user mark, which puts it on track for the expectations it laid out for 2012 at the end of last year. At that point, Brafton reported that the company anticipated more than 400 million people would use Google+ by the start of 2013.

 

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.