Brands can now had their social media profile links to their official company knowledge graph that appears in the Google search results. This means that you can include official links to profiles on places beyond Google+, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Myspace and LinkedIn – however it appears Pinterest is a glaring omission to the list.

The addition of the links to social media profiles is clearly automated in some cases, which Google admits on their help files. If companies do not wish for their social media profiles to be included, they cannot tell Google they don’t want them to be included. Google’s algorithms are also including the information that they find publicly available, even without the markup. And many brand knowledge graphs are already displaying these new social media links even though they do not have the markup active on their site

I haven’t seen it, it also does raise the question that maybe Google might grab parody or impersonator links by accident. We’ve seen incorrect logo shown up for brands knowledge graphs before, so it’s not a big stretch that could possibly happen. But Google may simply be including links that it finds on the official brand websites, as most brands are including those links from their site somewhere.

If your website is including incorrect links to your social media profiles, simply need to add the markup, as the markup will override the links that Google is found on its own.

This is a great addition for users, as it can be somewhat difficult to find social media accounts for some brands in the search results, and even on those brand’s websites.  And it helps show that Google is willing to promote competitive social media products.

Google says that webmasters can include links to other social media profiles, however only Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Myspace and LinkedIn are supported at this time.  However, it was a pretty big miss that Google didn’t include Pinterest as one of the supported social media profiles.