Local Knowledge Graph Finally Showing Social Icons

[JoyHawkins]

Ryan Scollon from Bowler Hat just reported on the Local Search Pros Community that he was seeing social icons in the local knowledge graph. I can confirm I see them too for the company I work for and I never saw them there before. This is a great addition for small businesses!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Thanks Joy! This post made me see something I've never seen before. I'll start a new thread about it.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Oops Joy, sorry I missed this post and just posted about it too.

But I added what I think is something else new - is this the new thing you discovered Colan?

<a href="http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/42747-new-social-profile-links-send-phone-new-google-local-knowledge-graph.html">NEW! Social Profile Links & Send to Phone on Google Local Knowledge Graph?</a>

 

[BenFisher]

Thank you Joy and Linda.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

I am seeing some businesses that have it and some that don't. What do you think is the difference maker?

 

[Robin]

Cool addition indeed! I don't see them (yet) here in The Netherlands though. Maybe Google is testing it first.

 

[James Watt]

I just did a few minutes of digging, figure I'd share what I found.

I had to look through 23 local dentists in maps results before I found 10 with social profiles showing. I saw 9 with Facebook, 2 with Google+ (in both cases, linking to the verified GMB page. Less than 10 followers and not a lot of posts in both cases) and one twitter profile.

Not a single one of the websites with social profiles showing had same-as schema. That's one of the main ways I know of to help influence social profiles showing in a brand knowledge panel, so I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being an influencer, but at the very least it's not necessary to do that to get social profiles showing in the knowledge panel.

Every single one of the Facebook profiles showing were verified local business pages with correct NAP. I did see that a few of the 13 I looked at without a Facebook icon in their knowledge panel also had verified local business pages on Facebook with correct NAP.

For the Google+ and twitter, I have no idea. The websites home page linked to the social profiles, but Google definitely didn't pick up all the profiles they linked to, and some of the businesses without anything showing also linked to their social profiles on the home page. The business with twitter showing was especially mysterious in my view, since twitter doesn't have any NAP or any other way for Google to tie it together that I know of, aside from the website linking to the profile, and I feel like I would have seen more twitter profiles in knowledge panels if that was how you got it on Google's radar.

I'll be curious to see what the actual influences are, after poking around in this small sample of businesses at least, I have no idea.

Edit:
Most of you have probably already seen this, but just for the sake of being complete, here's Google recommendations for schema on brand knowledge panels. This is why schema was the first thing I checked.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/social-profile-links

 

[heckler]

Good stuff.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Yeah I'm kind of wondering what we did right to get all 4 in our knowledge panel. I thought it had something to do w/ Open Graph tags but now I'm seeing that's not consistent with any of the examples I looked up.