As some have noticed, Google has started displaying social media profiles in the Knowledge Graph area of search results pages for many brand searches. If you search for Wendy’s, for example, you can very clearly see links to their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

The same holds true for Chase, Nike, Starbucks, and any other number of brands you can think of. This is good news for consumers who wish to engage with brands, without sifting through search results trying to find the appropriate channel. This makes them very easy to find.

It’s also good for businesses for that very same reason, and the even better news is that it’s not limited to major brands like those mentioned. Google is offering businesses markup to enable the search engine to display social profiles for their brands.

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji made the announcement on Google+ (via Search Engine Land):

In case you didn’t feel like clicking to expand that post, supported profiles include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Myspace. That’s right. You can even proudly display your Myspace profile. Google says it encourages you to specific additional social profiles as well, but for now, they won’t appear in the Google search results the way the others do.

Google says its algorithms process the social profiles yo specify, and display the most relevant ones based on individual user queries, so people won’t always necessarily see the same ones. It’s also worth noting that Google will only show verified profiles for sites that have a verification process. That’s not good news for brands wanting to display their Twitter profiles, as Twitter is notoriously stingy about handing out verifications.

You can find the documentation for setting up your structured markup here.