61% of the world’s top 100 brands created pages within a week of Google’s recent Google+ Pages announcement, according to research from BrightEdge.

That’s good news for Google. Clearly the brand interest is there, and coupled with interest from celebrities, this should help user growth.

Still, interestingly enough, only about 13% of the brands that created pages displayed a link to them on their home page (the number is more like 53% for Facebook). That news isn’t quite as good for Google. It seems that the brands want to make sure they’re found on Google+ if people are looking, but aren’t too concerned about making sure all of their visitors know that their Google+ Page is a good place to follow them.

“In this early phase of a Google+ presence, brands appeared to be having mixed success at building social networks around their Google+ presence,” the firm says. “In fact, Google had the largest fan contingent of any brand on Google+, having attracted more than 65,000 fans. But other 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.

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Of course, when you put in the amount of engagement displayed by the McDonald’s page, what can you really expect?

“Brands have been quick to embrace a presence on Google+, but clearly there is a long way to go in establishing social networks that really have scale and deep user engagement,” said BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu. “Now the real work begins for these brands if they want to extend their social presence on the Web from Facebook to the new Google+. And it will be interesting to see how these communication and marketing channels will grow in a way that remains meaningful for the world’s top brands.”

According to the research, 94% of the top 100 brands have a presence on Facebook. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s not 100% if these are really the top brands.

One more interesting point made is that Google+ pages on average appeared in the top 12 Google search results for the corresponding brand, while the brand’s Facebook pages appeared in the top 13 or 14.

Here are some Google+ page tips for your business.