How To Get Google To Show Your Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Accounts In Its Knowledge Graph Boxes

Businesses and brands can use structured data markup to add to or modify the social networks displayed in their knowledge box entry.

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As our sister site, Search Engine Land, reported today, Google has started displaying social media accounts other than Google+ in the knowledge graph box for brands and businesses.

The new wrinkle, an expansion of a feature that the search giant enabled in November for certain public figures, pop bands and artists, is automatically pulling in the information for most brands and businesses that generate a knowledge graph box in Google search results. See Nike’s, for example:

google-nike

Google is currently pulling in profiles from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Myspace and is displaying the ones most relevant ones in response to users’ search queries.

If your business’s entry is missing a profile (or is pointing to one that isn’t your preference), you can add structured data markup to your site, using schema.org vocabulary and JSON-LD markup format. Google’s help page on the topic gives instructions how to do that. Here are the basic requirements:

  • Publish markup on a page on your official website
  • Pages with markup must not be blocked to the Googlebot by robots.txt
  • Include a Person or Organization record in your markup with:
    • “url” = the url of your official website
    • “sameAs” = the urls of your official social media profile pages

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About the author

Martin Beck
Contributor
Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.

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