This latest Google update that included the linking of social network profiles within the Knowledge Graph really piqued my interest. For Google to allow “the competition” in the Knowledge Graph right next to their baby, G+ was a big step and one that I wanted to track. Luckily Google was kind enough to include our company in this update, giving us a LinkedIn profile in our Knowledge Graph (yay.) We have some work to do on that, I suppose.
As for this “research,” this was just a quick spreadsheet I whipped up to see exactly what 100 companies looked like on paper. I took a list of Forbes top 100 companies (raw text) and manually Googled each one of them in private browsing. After each query, I noted the following information:
if the company had a Knowledge Graph for their brand (almost all did)
if the company has social network links
which social network links each company posessed
which company possessed zero social links
Within about 5 minutes of poking around, I found out that Google is only including the following social networks:
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
LinkedIn
Instagram
YouTube
Now, there might be some rogue profiles out there that I didn’t catch, but I highly doubt Google is linking to Ello or Diaspora. I was however a tad surprised they did not choose to include Pinterest in their repertoire but who knows what might happen.
The numbers
If you want to see the Excel spreadsheet I was working off of you can download it here. It was really quick and dirty since I did everything manually so forgive me if a few numbers are off, but I did my best. I really just wanted to get a general idea. I didn’t really have time to make up any sort of fancy graphs or anything so this is what I have.
Twitter leads the race on this one, somehow Google+ is in 3rd place but we’ll see how that works out in the coming months. There aren’t a heck of a lot of YouTube profiles, but it is definitely represented.
As far as how many companies have how many profiles, it still might be rolling out so who knows. For now I recorded the data just to see if things change over the next few months.
If I worded that weird, its been a while since I used statistical terminology.
Please note that I recorded these numbers very nan-nonchalantly, so don’t kill me if I’m off somehow. In fact, anyone has anything to add to this, please let me know!
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Hello I'm Patrick Coombe and I'm the CEO and Founder of Elite Strategies, an agency I started in 2009. One of the main reasons I love blogging about SEO is the research it takes to come up with the posts. It allows me to not only write about what I love, but to learn more about the industry in the process. I hope you enjoyed this post, if you did consider sharing it or even better linking to it!
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