Back in 2012, Google launched the Knowledge Graph. This Google knowledge base was conceptualized and released for the sole purpose of helping the user retrieve and discover relevant information easily and quickly.
The knowledge base makes use of collective intelligence to pull out the most relevant results to its users' search queries. According to Google, this said use of collective intelligence not only includes association with Freebase, the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia. The knowledge base harnessed data to gather over 500 million objects plus over 3.5 billion facts and connections between all these objects.
At the beginning of 2015 Google has released great news for corporate brands. The Google Knowledge Graph has gotten way better for the benefit of both established and rising brands.
Aside from helping brands get found faster, Google Knowledge Graph has recently launched an update that now enables brands to get their social media links incorporated on their knowledge graph.
Marketers and brand owners can think of this new update as one which enables them to hit several birds with one stone. A single search query will not only secure a hit to their website. This single search, through the update, will also enable them to lead the user to the most appropriate channel to get the information needed from their brand.
So how does a brand get their social media links on their knowledge graph?
Google, through Google Developers, has released an article that lays out just how brands can make use of this new update.
According to the article found on Developers.Google.com, a brand's social media profiles can be added to their official website's knowledge graph by adding a markup structure to the website.
This markup structure is a piece of data which is in JSON-LD markup format enables Google to detect social profiles. This is given that…
1. the markup is embedded on the actual official website of the brand,
2. the pages where the markup structure is not blocked from the Googlebot by way of robots.txt
3. the markup includes an entity which is an actual person or organization record
Aside from the actual markup structure template provided on the article, Google Developers have also provided a way to check the structure markup before publishing. This is through Google's Structure Markup Testing Tool.
Social media has been the equalizer among brands that have long been established and among those that are still starting to get the spotlight on them. The reason for this is because social media especially Facebook and Twitter have provided a new level of connection between businesses and their prospects.
Social media has provided not only a better channel of connection between service providers and their customers. They have also provided a real time means of back and forth communication between these parties.
Thus, this latest update by Google to the Knowledge Graph means a very promising leverage for users and brands. This leverage encompasses a very wide expanse of brand scales and industries.