If you are in any way unclear as to the value social media marketing adds to your business, here are 6 good reasons for you to include it as part of your comprehensive online marketing plan. Your current plan may put more emphasis on search engine marketing, or you’re more focused on outreach—those are all well and good.

To add more value to your current online marketing campaign, social media marketing has to be part of the equation. It doesn’t have to take center stage or to be your overarching priority, but it has to be part of the total mix. Regardless of the size of your company, these 6 (of the thousands of reasons) should help you see the need to do social media marketing.

Reason #1: Social media’s huge direct and viral reach

If you build a solid page on Facebook, you develop a direct reach. This means that a certain percentage of people who like your page will see your updates. While it is true that Facebook has been reducing the organic reach of Facebook pages recently, there’s a workaround to that. When people go to your page, you can instruct them to like your page and then click your page’s setting to show your updates first.

You might want to show a video that teaches people how to do this. You might even post an animated gif. Whatever you do, clue people in that they can fix their settings to see your updates first. Now, for people to take the time and bother to do this, you have to offer content that is really valuable. This puts the onus on you. There has to be real value on your page for them to want to do this. But you can increase your direct reach by instructing people.

On top of that, when people like your content, they can share it on their wall. Since people on Facebook have friends and their friends have friends, this can easily have an exponential effect. In fact, even if your page only has a hundred likes, but these are real people with real friends, don’t be surprised if one of your posts gets viral and spreads all over the place.

Social media enables you to have a large direct reach. It also provides you with a tremendous opportunity to enjoy an exponential content coverage

Reason #2: Social media is habitual or addictive

While different demographics have shown softening or weakening of social media usage on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, this still doesn’t take away from the fact that a lot of people habitually use social media. In fact, a lot of people do this the first thing in the morning.

When they wake up, they go to their mobile phone or tablet and check their updates. It can easily become a habit. This gives you a tremendous opportunity to get your content and brand in front of many interested eyeballs.

Reason #3: Target audiences use different content formats

The great thing about social media marketing is that you are not restricted to just one content format. You can use video, pictures, links, blog posts, text, or audio file formats. Different platforms specialize in different formats. And when you create content for one platform, you can easily make different versions of it in different formats to spread out to other platforms.

For example, I write a blog post and post it on Facebook. I create a very attention-grabbing graphic for that blog post. So when I post it on my Facebook page, a preview of the image shows and it grabs attention. People click on it, and they end up on my website.

I can also use the graphic to share on Pinterest. Alternatively, you can make a slideshow film out of the text of your blog post or and upload it on YouTube. Or you may also upload the video to your blog and embed it there. Or cut and paste sections of the article or post on Twitter, along with a link to the whole post or article.

Do you see how this works? You get access to the different audiences of those different platforms by simply re-purposing or recycling the same content that you made for one platform and sharing those other formats on other platforms. This increases your potential reach.

Reason #4: Most social media platforms can be segmented

If you’ve ever been to Instagram, you know that when you see a picture, it usually has many different tags. If you’ve been on Twitter, you’d see that a lot of the hot tweets also have hashtags. Those tags are very valuable. When you use a tag with your content, you are essentially categorizing your content. People use those tags to search for content. This is a very powerful segmentation tool.

People who are looking for cute Chihuahua puppies, for example, will use certain hashtags that are different from people looking for libertarian political posts. If you have a very tightly defined audience, social media platforms’ built-in segmentation tools and features can definitely help you.

You probably already know that huge audiences that are not very targeted are essentially worthless. Thanks to social media marketing’s segmentation features. You can get a smaller volume of people from many different platforms. And you can rest assured that these people are actually interested in whatever it is you are saying. These segmentation tools go a long way in helping you build a very refined and well-qualified audience base. This, in turn, increases your likelihood of making a sale.

Reason #5: Sharing content on popular platforms can be automated

You do not have to bother with manually going to Facebook or Twitter anymore, thanks to tools like Hootsuite and SocialOomph. These tools will help you spend less hours configuring your scheduled post. And you will worry less about copying and pasting content from a document. By simply automating your posts, you can publish for up to six months on Facebook. This means that you can set up your Facebook account to post six to ten or more times every day. You do not have to keep an eye on it because you have already fed it content.

The best part is that a lot of these automated tools use bulk feeds. Meaning, you can format your content in an Excel file and convert it to CSV and plug it into these tools. You don’t have to input the materials one by one. Talk about saving a lot of time while also maximizing your reach.

Reason #6: Your brand gets natural repetition through multi-platform marketing

Assuming that all your social media accounts on all four major platforms look similar to each other, you get many bites at the apple. You really do. When people run into your brand on Facebook, there’s a chance they might run into your brand on Twitter.

If there is enough graphical similarity between your brands, then they can see that you’re all over the place and they can converse or engage with your brand regardless of where they are on the internet.

Eventually, this builds a tremendous amount of familiarity and people might become so comfortable that they join your mailing list when you call them to action. The best part of this is that it happens naturally by you simply creating accounts on all the major platforms. Your brand speaks to people who are interested in your niche, regardless of where they go.