Specify Your Social Profiles To Google

Include your social profile in search results

Use markup on your official website to add your social profile information to the Google Knowledge panel in some searches. Knowledge panels can prominently display your social profile information.

Get started quickly with these instructions for formatting and publishing the proper markup code.

Social Profiles

Use structured data markup embedded in your public website to specify your preferred social profiles. You can specify these types of social profiles:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Myspace
• Pinterest
• SoundCloud
• Tumblr

We encourage you to specify other social profiles as well, but they aren't currently included in Google search results.

Google algorithms process the social profiles you specify and then display the most relevant ones in response to users' queries. (For sites that have a verification process, Google will only show verified profiles.) The social profiles in your markup must correspond to the ones that users can see on the same page.

Adding structured markup to your site

The schema.org vocabulary and JSON-LD markup format are an open standard for embedding structured data in web pages. 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

Here is a basic JSON-LD template for an organization to specify several social profiles:

<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>

Here is a similar template for a person to specify their social profiles:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{ "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Person",
  "name" : "your name",
  "url" : "http://www.your-site.com",
  "sameAs" : [ "http://www.facebook.com/your-profile",
      "http://instagram.com/yourProfile",
      "http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourprofile",
      "http://plus.google.com/your_profile"] }
</script>

You can simply replace the url and social profiles with your own values, and insert this code into the page that shows users these profiles. If the profiles visible on the page are formatted differently from the markup, that's okay.

The SCRIPT block can be inserted anywhere on the page — either the head or body of the page.

Note: As long as you use the same schema.org types as the example, you can also use microdata or RDFa markup formats instead of JSON-LD. For example, in microdata, visible links can be marked up by in a structured data SPAN, like this:

<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>

Testing and Publishing Your Markup

The block of structured data you produce, enclosed within the <script type="application/ld+json"> ... tags, can be inserted into any HTML page on your company's official website that is crawled and indexed by Google. Within the page, it may be placed in either the or region. Either way, it won't affect how your document appears in users' web browsers.

To verify that your markup is well-formed and can be processed by Google, paste the HTML source of your marked-up page (or just the <script> block) into Google's Structured Data Testing Tool.

When Google next crawls the page, its indexing algorithms will process the profiles from your markup and make them eligible to be used in search results. You can ask Google to crawl the page by following the instructionshere. Please note that this process may take up to a week.

Troubleshooting

My social media profile isn't displaying

The Google Knowledge Graph panel doesn't display your social media profile, even though you've added the markup to your official website.

First, check that the social profile information is shown correctly with no errors in the Markup Tester tool, as described above. Also check to see if your profiles are verified - Google does not show unverified profiles (for social profiles sites that allow verification). If all looks correct, and you have waited at least one week since your marked-up page was last crawled by Google, report the missing events using the small "Feedback" link under the Knowledge Graph panel in Google search. Click "Wrong?" on your company's name and explain the problem, being sure to use the term "social profiles" in your description of the problem.

I don't want my social media profile displayed

Google has a social profile displayed for for you or your company, but you don't want it to appear.

Even if you don't include this markup on your page, Google algorithms may find information that is publicly available on the web. You can use this markup to override the information Google finds automatically, but you can't specify not to list a social profile.