How add social media link in knowledge graphs

Google’s Knowledge Graph now shows social profiles for brands. In other words, the card you see on the right hand side when you Google a brand (the one that shows your logo, information from Wikipedia and other “rich information”) will now show links to our social profiles.

Google are now extending this to brands. So, if you Google a brand’s name, you’ll now see a link to their social accounts.

Doing a quick check on Twitter and Google+, it looks like marketers are generally happy about this move, which is Google’s way of embedding social media even further in their search results. If you’re thinking “where’s Google+ in all this?”, Google have reserved a special place for its “social network” right under the other social icons, pulling through the most recent posts from the brand’s Google+ Page. The only exception to this is if you have no content on your page. For instance, the Staples Google+ Page is pretty much dead, with only a dozen followers and no content. Due to that, when you search for Staples on Google, you’ll see the social icon for Google+ right next to the Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter icons.

Just FYI, the Knowledge Graph supports links to the following social networks:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• MySpace

If you’re wondering, Google doesn’t display a link to your site from this Knowledge Graph, as it relies on your site being listed in the first page of the search results, right next to the Knowledge Graph.

You too can add a structured data markup to your website by using the vocabulary available in schema.org. The instructions on how to do this is are available at Google’s help page on the topic, the basic requirements of which are:

• Publish mark-up on a page of your official website.
• Ensure that the pages with mark-up must not be blocked to the Googlebot by robots.txt
• Consider including a person or organization’s record in the mark-up with:
  1. “url” = the url of your official website
  2. “sameAs” = the urls of your official social media profile pages

So, what are you waiting for? Grab this lucrative opportunity and make your brand known through Google’s Knowledge Graph Box.