How To Build Your Online Authority Using Facebook Ads

Over 2 billion people use Facebook and 1.5 billion checks in with their feed every day.

So, if you’re looking for a big pool of potential customers, this global social media powerhouse has you covered. 

Not only is Facebook one of the top online sales channels, but success on social media also feeds online success overall. And businesses know it.

A solid Facebook presence boosts your online authority, which top pundits believe to be one of the most important search engine ranking factors. The higher your authority, the better your business will rank in search results. So, how can you harness the power of Facebook ads? In this post, I’ll show you how.

What is online authority? 

You can think of online authority like the internet’s version of ‘word-of-mouth’. The more people are talking about you, interacting with you and sharing what you have to say, the more ‘authority’ search engines assume you have in your area. Meaning, they’ll bump your website, articles and other media with your name on up the SERPs. 

Why do you need it? 

Put simply, authority-building is part of brand-building. The stronger your online presence, the more recognition, and association you build for your brand.

Types of Facebook ads

If you want to take advantage of Facebook’s advertising power, you need to understand the available options. Facebook offers a truly dizzying array of ad types, so here is a selection of the most applicable to authority-building. These ads work because they do one of the following:

• Send traffic to your website
• Encourage people to share your content 
• Get your name and work in front of industry influencers
• Build your reputation as a thought leader
• Encourage page likes and follows

Link click ads

These simple ads promote your website and direct traffic to your chosen landing pages. They’re used to drive sales, subscriptions and other conversions. But you can use them to direct your Facebook followers to your best content and promote backlink opportunities. 

Video ads and multi-product ads

Video ads and image carousels (multi-product ads) take advantage of people’s strong preference for multi-media content. You can add links to landing pages (see above) or back to your Facebook page to bring in more likes.

Page post boosts

You can boost any of your Facebook posts. Boosting promotes your content to specific audiences, which you can choose down a person’s job title. Facebook places the word ‘sponsored’ on the post, which is visible when it appears on your target’s wall. These ads are best at encouraging page likes and shares.

Dynamic products ads

Facebook places these ads using dynamic algorithms ads based on people’s past engagements with your website or page. They’re great at directing people from your Facebook page to your website.

Page like ads

Page like ads are pretty self-explanatory. If you want to increase the number of pages likes you have, use these to target the audiences you think are most likely to ‘like’ you. 

Chatbots ads

You can add a Facebook chatbot to generate leads via ads. They can improve your brand awareness and interact with your customers on your behalf. Before chatbots, we couldn’t respond to all of the your prospects and engage with them all the time. Now this problem has been solved.

Define your audience

To get the most out of advertising, it needs to be targeted. Using the ‘custom’ function in Facebook’s Audience Insights tool, you can work out what kind of people are most likely to interact with your ads. 

The simplest method is to search for people who ‘like’ one of your main competitors and view a summary of their statistics. For example, are they mostly female, ages 25-34 and follow a lot of pages about famous internet cats? Or, are they 55-70-year-old retired campervan owners? 

Using Facebook’s audience insights feature, you can find out what devices your audience use, what countries they are in and how often they log into the platform. 

Target influencers

To build your online authority fast, you need to generate backlinks from industry influencers. According to search engine logic, if the big guns are talking about you, you must know what you’re doing.

If you want influencers to link to your content, you need to get it seen by them. To do this you could:

• Find out who they are
• Use their information to create ‘audience profiles’ for your adverts
• Produce killer content can’t resist sharing
• Advertise it directly to them
• Mention and link to them in your content

Boost your popular posts

There’s no point paying to advertise something half-baked. Facebook’s ‘boost post’ ads allow you to build your following and get more traction from well-performing content. 

Target fresh eyes and new audiences with Facebook’s Page Insights function, which identifies your most popular post and give them a boost. Alternatively, use the Insights function included with most good website builders to find your most popular on-site content and post/boost this through Facebook.

When boosting posts, make sure you:

• Use content that’s helpful to your audience (how-to’s, lists of resources, tutorial videos are all great candidates)
• Add links to landing pages on your website within the article (internal links build your SEO and direct traffic to where it’s needed)
• Make sure all content has visible sharing buttons (who knows, it might even go viral)
• Add calls-to-action to tell the reader what you would like them to do next

Start a conversation

You might think your role ends once you’ve picked and paid for the right ad type. Not so! Interaction builds authority. It’s rarely enough to push out a post and let it lie. Always interact with commenters on your posts and on the website landing pages you’ve directed to from your content. 

People are more likely to follow links, convert and interact with future posts if you show that you care whether they get involved. 

To sum things up….

Much to the disappointment of many a small business owner, there’s no quick fix for successful authority building. But luckily, getting your business noticed with Facebook ads will give it a big shove in the right direction. By following these simple tips, you’ll start climbing up the ranks and rein in the SEO benefit in no time.

Photo by Timothy Hales Bennett on Unsplash