Google has started displaying the social profiles of businesses along with the Knowledge Graph. This is a good move by Google as the entire social visibility of the brand can now become visible to the user with a simple brand name search query.
As for example, a search for Samsung brand returns the social profiles maintained by samsung under the Knowledge Graph displayed on the right hand side.
Now, the question is, how does Google identifies which is the official social account of the business? or How can you enable Google to identify and display your brands social profiles in Google search results?
The answer is, you need to use the structured data markup to specify your preferred social profiles. Social profiles currently supported are:
Facebook
Twitter
G+
Instagram
Youtube
LinkedIn
Myspace
In order for Google to recognize structured data as social profiles, make sure you fulfill these 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
You can use he schema.org vocabulary and JSON-LD markup format for displaying markups.
Example Snippet for My Blog using JSON-LD markup format:
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{ “@context” : “http://schema.org”,
“@type” : “Organization”,
“name” : “Seosandwitch”,
“url” : “http://www.seosandwitch.com”,
“sameAs” : [ “https://www.facebook.com/SeoSandwitch”,
“https://twitter.com/seosandwitch”,
“https://plus.google.com/+Seosandwitch/posts”]
}
</script>
OR you can also use the schema.org vocabulary:
<span itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization”>
<link itemprop=”url” href=”http://www.seosandwitch.com”>
<a itemprop=”sameAs” href=”https://www.facebook.com/SeoSandwitch”>FB</a>
<a itemprop=”sameAs” href=”https://twitter.com/seosandwitch”>Twitter</a>
</span>
The SCRIPT block can be inserted anywhere on the page — either the head or body of the page.
Also See:
