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

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


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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