If there’s one maxim in online marketing to remember, it’s this: sharing is good. The more your content is shared online, the more opportunities you have to engage prospective customers and even gain valuable behavioral data that can help you win those customers. Getting your social media channels to rank organically in SERPs—especially Google—isn’t always easy, but it just got a little easier. In January, the search giant announced a new feature that will let you include your social profiles in the Google Knowledge panel in some searches.
Adding your social profile information takes a little time (and a little data markup knowledge), but the results are worth it. Even a few more visits to your social channels each month can increase your marketing reach—which in turn can increase sales, service visits, and customer retention. To get started, follow the tutorial below.
1. Copy the structured markup template for an Organization provided by Google below in either JSON-LD or microdata format. Either will work as long as you follow the schema.org vocabulary, but your webmaster may have a preference.
JSON-LD:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{ "@context" : "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "Organization",
"name" : "Your Organization Name",
"url" : "http://www.your-site.com",
"sameAs" : [ "http://www.facebook.com/your-profile",
"http://www.twitter.com/yourProfile",
"http://plus.google.com/your_profile"]
}
</script>
Microdata:
<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"> <link itemprop="url" href="http://www.your-company-site.com"> <a itemprop="sameAs" href="http://www.facebook.com/your-company">FB</a> <a itemprop="sameAs" href="http://www.twitter.com/YourCompany">Twitter</a> </span>
2. Update the markup with the URLs of your social media profiles. Google has stated that the following social profiles can be specified:
- Google+
- YouTube
- Myspace
While you can include other profile URLs, they will not currently be displayed in search results. If you have a particularly robust Instagram or Pinterest profile, though, it doesn’t hurt to include it—you never know when the next algorithm update will arrive.
3. Publish the markup on a page of your official website that is not blocked by robots.txt.
4. Test your markup with Google’s new Structured Data Testing Tool, launched in conjunction with the social profiles announcement. You can find it here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/structured-data/testing-tool/. Just past the HTML source of the edited page in the open field and click “Validate” to see the results.
Image: Google
5. Sit back and let the crawlers work. The next time Google indexes your page, it will process each profile and make them eligible for inclusion in search results. You can use this set of instructions to manually ask Google to re-crawl your site here, which may take up to a week.
Before you submit your profiles for inclusion, be sure to do a quick check to confirm that your name and URL are consistent across all sites. This consistency has always been an important component of local SEO, and it looks like this is how Google will be determining the eligibility of profiles going forward.
This feature may eventually be added to the Google Dashboard, but integrating your social profiles now means you can start seeing benefits even sooner. When your profiles start appearing in results, you’ll get more eyes on each post—which means your content should be as engaging and original as possible. If you have questions about adding your profiles to search results or energizing your social media strategy, we’re here to help.
