Google adds social media updates carousel to business profiles

Google is turning some Business Profiles into living social feeds, surfacing recent posts as a Social Media Updates carousel below the core listing details. The cards can sit under the address, phone number, and reviews, which pushes fresh content into the same space many people still treat as a static local profile.

Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark, flagged the shift after seeing Google explicitly label the module as a social media updates carousel. The change matters because it gives recent social activity a visible role in local search, especially on branded queries and mobile, where the feature has appeared most reliably. In practice, a profile is no longer just a pin on a map and a star rating. It can now look like a living stream of what a business is saying right now.

Google’s own documentation shows how wide the social plumbing has become. A Business Profile can carry one social media link from each supported platform, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X and YouTube. Google also says posts about events, deals or specials may automatically show on mobile, and those featured posts can come either from linked social channels such as Facebook and Instagram or from posts created directly on the Business Profile. The company’s Learning Center now groups social links and posts under “Keep your customers informed,” a small phrase that signals a bigger change in how Google sees local presence.

Availability is still limited. Google says the featured-posts behavior is currently available in English for single-location food and drink businesses in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Even so, the direction is clear. Google introduced public support for managing social media links in Business Profiles in August 2023, and industry coverage has also noted that Google may automatically add social links to eligible profiles. Owners can connect one account per platform in the dashboard, but they do not control which individual post surfaces, only which networks are connected.

That makes the editorial takeaway hard to miss: local search and social publishing are becoming one visibility system. The businesses most likely to benefit will be the ones that keep posting clearly described updates about services, products, offers, locations and expertise, so Google and AI-driven search systems have more to work with when deciding what a business is and when it should appear.