Does increased users adoption drives the top brands to social networks? Or maybe is it the brands adoption that drives the users to social networks? And which came first, the egg or the chicken? Let’s be honest, the only thing that does matter is that the social networking war is hitting up!

Google+ is growing. Fast. For the past month I discussed about it over and over (and over) as new indications for the rise of Facebook’s contender just keeps coming. The Google+ rise is reflected in both growing user base and also by adoption and usage of most major brands (and again, it doesn’t really matter which came first).

A recent study from the marketing firm, BrightEdge, is revealing that the total number of the top 100 brands followers (in Circles) in Google+ has jumped from 222,000 in December 2011 to 3.1 million in February 2012, yes, 14 times more at two months time-frame!

But this incredible jump is mostly attributed to only the top 10 brands that generated almost the whole rise in followers (97% to be more accurate). The rest 90 top brands have less than 100K followers combined which is less than each brand from the top 10 separately.

However before jumping into conclusions, its important to understand that it is natural that the top brands have significant domination rate. Yes, the balance in Google+ is certainly irregular, but it could relate to the facts that the top brands have more resources to create social contents right from the start and they also hold strong reputation that immediately attracts followers.

For greater realizations and more conclusive insights we would have to see how the balance is shifting over the next few months. In any case, here are the top 10 most followed brands in Google+:

BrightEdge is mentioning that only a few brands out of the top 100 brands in the world didn’t adopted Google+ yet. Among them we can find two of Google’s greatest rivals, Microsoft and Apple, that probably wants all the eggs and chickens for themselves (or at least that Google won’t have them).