Social media is mandatory in business. If you want your business to stand a chance in today’s market you need to be in the public eye. A business without a social media presence is like a storefront hidden in the back of a retail center—you might as well be invisible.

Consumers who are interested in your products or services will likely research your business online. If you don’t have a social media or online presence, potential customers may question your company’s credibility. This is especially true for technology start-ups. Specializing in technology and not having this kind of presence is like waving a red flag. Lack of credibility is small-business kryptonite. Don’t go near it. Twitter and Instagram the hell out of your venture. These advertising vehicles are easy and free. More important, they can yield exponential results.

Allow us to introduce a phenomenon we like to call “The Facebook Branding Effect.” Facebook’s newsfeed gives users the unique experience of regularly viewing posts by friends with whom they may not have personally spoken in decades. This regular viewing creates an artificial sense of familiarity. Users feel they have a strong sense of other users’ lives via status updates. This makes posting a message or picture on Facebook a high-leverage activity, whether the post is business or personal. This is especially true if the post garners a number of likes and comments, as these factors                                                           make it more visible on other users’ Facebook newsfeeds.

It only takes two seconds to post a message that conveys a specific image you want to sell; yet Facebook will work around the clock to broadcast your message to hundreds of other users. You don’t necessarily have to post often to have an impact on your viewing audience either. Now this is high-leverage—in business and in personal life.

This all sounds pretty great, right? Well nothing’s perfect, including the Twitter bird. There is a slight downside to social media marketing: gauging return on investment can be a bit tricky. It’s possible to get the hard numbers that advertising options like click-ad campaigns offer because there are a lot of intangibles. Social media advertising isn’t conducive to such tracking, and gets a lot of flack for it from the business world.

Don’t deactivate your Instagram account just yet, however. Even though it’s hard to put your finger on the exact return on investment, you can still be certain social media is a high-leverage marketing strategy. Even without hard numbers, we know this because of one simple fact: a high percentage of the population uses social media. Odds are that a high percentage of your consumer base uses it as well.

This article is an excerpt from the book “The Whiteboard: Go from Blank Canvas to a Productive, Leveraged, & Highly-Profitable Business” by Chris Haddon and Jason Balin. Please click here to see more.