Shawshank, VA 11/22/2011 (StreetBeat) – It's been just more than a week since Google+(Nasdaq:GOOG) launched pages for businesses and already most major brands have signed up. There's just one little problem: No one seems to know or care that these pages exist.Some 61% of the top 100 biggest brands have created Google+ pages, all but one of which have fewer than 50,000 fans on the site so far, according to data released Wednesday by BrightEdge, a search engine optimization business. In fact, two dozen companies had no fans whatsoever and others such as McDonald's (NYSE:MCD) and Verizon (NYSE:VZ) were stuck in the dozens, despite the fact that many have hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans on Facebook.
Google+ Pages for businesses have had a weaj showing so far. So what's the one business that's actually managed to break the 50,000 mark? Google, and even it hasn't done that well. The Internet giant had roughly 65,000 fans at the time the report came out.
That said, Google+ pages are quite new and it may not be fair to compare their numbers with Facebook, but BrightEdge's report suggests a deeper problem. Only 12% of the top brands on Google+ mentioned those pages on the company Web site, hinting that businesses may have created a page just to do it but have little interest in promoting it.
As we said when Google+ Pages launched, there is great potential for these branded pages if Google can find ways to incorporate them when users search for news and updates about products and businesses online. But at the moment, it's hard enough to find a company's page when searching on Google+, let alone to stumble onto a page while browsing elsewhere online. If that doesn't change, Google+ Pages will stay dead.
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