Although Google Plus has not yet managed to outshine Facebook users by volume, the search engine’s latest attempt at a social network already has a notable number of followers.

From December, the fans that the top 100 firms have in their circle has grown by 1,400 percent. According to a study by BrightEdge, a social and search management solution for global enterprises, the two million people who followed these top 100 brands in the final months of 2011 have been grown to 3.1 million.

The rapid growth in Google+ among the top 100 brands is mainly driven by the top companies that have garnered the majority of followers, and share a powerful presence on the platform.

Fashion retailer H&M is the brand with the largest number of followers on Google+, with more than 4 million people in their circles (a figure that almost doubles the total of the fans who had a hundred top brands in late December).  The second is the technology company Samsung, which is approaching 372,000 followers. Pepsi and Coke occupy the third and fourth slots respectively, with 350,000 and 336,000 followers in their circles.

Other top 100 companies that plump out the G+ Top Ten brands are Starbucks (335k), Sony (258k), Intel (258k), eBay (253), Google (193K) and Amazon (184K).  But not all companies are so eager to hop on another social networking bandwagon.

“While the growth of the G+ Ten is impressive, in contrast we have noticed many companies seem to be taking a slower, wait-and-see stance to the search giant’s social offering,” said BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu.

“While the majority of top 100 brands that have adopted Facebook pages also have Google+ pages, notable brands have sat in the sidelines for Google+.”

The Pace of Brand Marketing on Social Networks

The pace of growth in the Google+ certainly looks impressive. Google+ activity conducted by the brand in the pages of this social networking site are very important. It is the company profiles that can drive website traffic and build competition with Facebook, which is perceived as an ideal place for promotion.

Brand engagement on Google+ is increasing, according to a report published by Research firm Simply Measured. The report suggested that 62 of the world’s 100 biggest brands had signed up to the social site in the last three months. The study reports that 15 of the biggest brands post up to three times a week on the social site, compared to only 11 who behaved this way in earlier analysis.

Google+ has its advantages over other social networks in the forms of Circles, sharing of media and content, Hangouts and the +1 button, already proliferating around the web. The Circles feature is one of the key features for brands marketing on Google+, providing a segmented platform to target customers with messaging.

Google’s Ripples feature is also a perk for marketers, allowing businesses to create visual representations for their products to reach targeted users. Google+’s activity stream is also important for direct consumer engagement, sharing rich media content such as photos, video and audio about the product recommendations.

In addition, the +1 leverage a brand’s Google+ activity together with their paid and natural search activity and wider social recommendations.

Other content marketing providers are also heating up the competition. Thismoment, Inc., the provider of social content management software, last week acquired Position2 Brand Monitor, a leading social media monitoring and engagement platform. The acquisition enables thismoment to listen to product- or service-related conversations across social media sites, blogs, news outlets and forums, all in real time. This will also provide thismoment an enhanced understanding of marketing campaign performance with conversation metrics, including volume, sentiment, and reach.