Twitter is still the most popular social networking tool among major brands, according to a new report by threepipe. As many as 69 companies are active on the site, up from 63 last year. YouTube though has seen the highest increase in users though, going from 38 to 63 in the last year.

The use of Facebook has increased too, with fourteen new companies creating pages on the platform. New services Google+ and Pinterest are gaining a small amount of traction too.

Google+ has actually been adopted by 40 of the 100 companies, although only twenty-three are actually active on the service.  It seems that the brands were possibly signed up with SEO considerations in mind as Google gives prominence in search to Google+ users and updates.

Ten companies are on Pinterest too, including Sainsbury’s, who’s account was actually started by a fan but is now owned by the company. 20 FTSE 100 companies are also on Flickr.

There are still 22 companies that the research defines as having “no obvious presence on social media”. Although two of these are holding companies who’s brands are active in the social space, that is still 20% of FTSE 100 companies not engaging in social media. These though are not predominantly consumer brands, and are mostly international or commodity groups that are not particularly prominent in the UK marketplace, and specialist investment companies  who may be sensitive about what information they make public. However, Prudential, with its seven million UK customers, is also absent.

High flying fashion brand Burberry’s offline increase in popularity has been matched online, with a four-fold increase in Twitter followers over the course of the year. The brand have been very innovative with initiative such as the ‘Tweetwalk’ which was a partnership with Twitter itself, and allowed followers to see models in the it’s latest collection even before London Fashion Week attendees did. This forward thinking approach has led to them having 900,000 followers (compared, for example with 20,00 for BT, and 40,00 for ITV).

Although often seen as an older brand, Marks and Spencer have a strong Facebook presence. With over 700,000 likes, they get an average of 802 likes per post, and 116 comments per post, showing a good level of engagement too. Vodafone too also do well on Facebook, with they 500,000 fans leaving an average of 124 comments per post, and an average of 220 likes per post.

It seems quite clear that Facebook, and particularly Twitter, are the cornerstones of any social media campaign. With visual content proving more popular (Barclays has six separate photostreams,) 2012 is likely to be the year that the FTSE 100 adopt Pinterest, YouTube, and Flickr and so on.