How do social profiles work, and how do I tell where each was found?

Social profiles appear in two places, and they come from different processes.

• found_social_profiles contains business profiles we discovered and verified by searching the web. Each includes the platform, the profile handle and URL, a confidence level, and an indicator of where it was found: on the website you submitted, on the website we found, both, or neither.

• The social links inside website_analysis are whatever links the business put on its own site. They are not verified and may include personal or staff profiles, so a link there does not always appear in found_social_profiles.

Profiles found through web search are generally the more reliable of the two. Use the confidence level to decide handling: high confidence is safe to automate on, medium is worth a look, and low is usually ignored.

If you already know a business’s profiles, submit them in social_profiles on the request and we report whether each was confirmed under input_social_profiles.