Sharing is caring!

It is summer. Some of us have some free time to chill, sit in the sun – and improve your marketing skills. If you are looking for some new marketing strategies and tactics read some social media marketing books. If you are looking for some blogging and social media marketing books to learn something new, get better at marketing, and even get inspiration: Here are the books you need to read!

This list contains social media marketing books for advanced marketers as well as for beginners. There are books with very actionable marketing tips and step-by-step instructions to social media marketing success. There are some more strategic books and there are also books that cover the basic understanding of how social media works.

I am fairly sure that you can find at least one social media marketing book in the list that can help you to get better results from your social media marketing efforts!

1. Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction

Derek Thompson

Taking a closer look at what it takes to make things successful online: Is there such a thing as real virality – meaning starting from zero to hero? What do you really need to make your stuff spread? How does psychology work and help to spread things that are already picking up speed? And what can you do to stand out between all the other stuff that fills the thin air of online competition?

Let’s be challenged to ask questions and change your point of view!

2. The Choice Factory: 25 behavioral biases that influence what we buy 

Richard Shotton

Social media can help you sell more stuff. But in order to use social media to increase sales, you have to understand what drives consumer decisions.

Learn about the reasons why people buy – and why they don’t buy. Read about examples and theory behind behavioral science and use it to make your marketing campaigns more effective.

3. Networking in the 21st Century: Why Your Network Sucks And What To Do About It

David J.P. Fisher

Have you ever realized that people with a huge network or the ability to build a network fast are better equipped for entrepreneurial success than people without a network?

The reason is simple:

A network is a multiplying factor when it comes to business growth. Your network can provide you with a ton of benefits: Customers, partners, guest posting opportunities, content partnership, a recommendation – the possibilities to win with your network are endless. And this book shows you how to grow your network fast with the right people – and how to use this network.

4. Instagram Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Following Fast, Driving Massive Traffic & Generating Predictable Profits

Jeremy McGilvrey

Instagram success is mainly a two-step process:

1. grow your followers
2. turn followers into money

That results in many people desperately trying to grow their followers. But that does not guarantee success if you cannot turn them into paying customers.

This book is all about getting targeted (warm) leads – even when you don’t have many followers. Yes, some of the tips can be found elsewhere – that is simply because not everybody else is wrong about Instagram works. But this book provides you with.

5. The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI

Carlos Gil

This book is about the importance of a brand for social media success and how you can use engagement and your personality to humanize a business to build a connection to your audience. Change your perspective and don’t use social media as a shout out medium. An engaged audience is worth a thousand times what a large but detached audience can give you.

If you know how social media marketing still works when everybody and his grandmother are competing for attention listen to Carlos Gil.

6. Social Media Marketing Workbook: How to Use Social Media for Business

Jason McDonald

If you do not want to read endless theory but are looking for a step-by-step plan that you can follow to use social media for your business, this may just be what you are looking for.

Learn how to get started and never get stuck. That sounds just like your dream? This book will be the guide you need if you want to get started but don’t know how and where to start.

7. Digital Trust: Social Media Strategies to Increase Trust and Engage Customers

Barry Connolly

Whether you are able to turn your social media audience into paying customers depends on one thing: How much does your audience trust you? The more they trust you the more money can you make from them. This book gives you strategies that will help you to increase trust. Engaging your audience is one step on your journey to more trust. You will learn advanced techniques to build a more engaged relationship with your audience.

8. YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer

Sean Cannell

If you are not so much into writing, YouTube and videos may just be your thing. to help you find an audience and learn about all the opportunities you get by publishing videos on Youtube, this book is a great start. You will learn how to get started and make your videos spread to a larger audience when your following is still small.

This may not be your best choice if you already are a professional YouTuber and looking for the secret to making the next step. This is for beginners who need some help to find their way around YouTube and the many options you have to grow faster.

9. Social Media Explained: Untangling the World’s Most Misunderstood Business Trend, Revised and Expanded Second Edition

Mark Schaefer

The book for building your social media strategy when you get the feeling it is all too complicated and overwhelming. Mark Schaefer explains social media in plain English supported by illustrations.

Whether you are an executive, startup founder or small business owner, this will answer many of your first questions. This is not an advanced marketing book for social media marketing experts looking for the next big idea. This is a book for beginners who need a starting point!

10. Content Mavericks: How to Grow Your Business with Insanely Shareable Content

Andrew and Pete

Hard fact: You can create huge amounts of content and never reach content marketing success.

This book is about cutting out the wasted hustle and focusing on the necessary steps to make your content work in favor of your business marketing. This book is a step-by-step process to build your online presence based on content and develop a content marketing strategy.

11. Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less

Joe Pulizzi

You may wonder why I added so many content marketing books to this list of social media books. The truth is: Without content, your social media marketing is likely to fail. And better content can tremendously help your social media success.

Joe Pulizzi of The Content Marketing Institute breathes content marketing. He may not have invented it, but he certainly knows how to put content to great use, develop a content strategy – and what kind of content it takes to succeed!

12. Expert Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Creating a Mass Movement of People Who Will Pay for Your Advice

Russel Brunson

If you already have a business or product, this book will help you improve your sales.

Russel shows you the complete process of positioning yourself as an expert in your field and how to make people absolutely crave your knowledge. This book is jam-packed with applicable advice.

13. Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising World

Robert McKee

The book explains how to grab the attention of your audience when advertising is no longer an option.

The how-to guide for creating helpful, informative, attention-grabbing content. This book will show you how to use this content to engage and interact with your potential customers and turn it into effective marketing.

14. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Ann Handley

This book is about so much more than creating good content. It is about how to grab and keep the attention of your audience through online communication and the stories you tell.

Nothing fancy, or complicated. Just plain good advice on writing better content.

15. All Marketers are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works–and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All

Seth Godin

Do you trust marketers?

If your audience trusts you as a marketer, your job is half done. And this book tells you how you can use your stories to build trust.

You will learn what makes a good story – and how you can use these stories to sell more products.

16. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers

Seth Godin

Between all these online marketing books, this one is rather a classic – but still relevant.

It takes a thorough look at building a brand and how relationships work not only in the area of social media. Understanding how to build trust and relations from the first contact until you can convert a customer is still so relevant even after almost 20 years.

17. Shareology: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy

Bryan Kramer

This book is more about the human interaction that involves sharing – than the technology of social media.

Bryan Kramer takes a thorough look at the power of human-to-human interaction and how you can use this knowledge to get better results for your business.

18. The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue

Shama Hyder

You want to take action? This is the book you need.

You will want to put this book down over and over again, because you simply have to sit at your computer and implement what you learn.

However, if you are already a marketing pro, the marketing tips from this book may be a little too basic for you.

19. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs

Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah

The book for all entrepreneurs with more brain than money. This will teach you how to use online media to get found by your customers – as opposed as to try to hit your audience with your marketing message.

Inbound marketing is the solution for people who are not comfortable with classic “sales” – when you still need to sell…

20. Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki not only “gets” social media, he also lives it. He is still approachable and engages with his audience in various social media channels. This attitude comes through in all of his books.

This book provides you with a ton of actionable ideas and examples on how to connect to your audience and customers. You learn how to enchant your audience so that you can build up genuine interest in your products.

21. The CEO’s Guide to Marketing: The Book Every Marketer Should Read Before Their Boss Does

This book is written to help CEOs and marketers to increase sales. Because in the end all followers, traffic and signups are worth nothing if your sales fails.

This book is stuffed with information and graphics to explain it.

Even if you already know a ton about marketing, this book will help you figure about which are the important parts of your marketing process and which ones to ditch.

22. Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (And Other Social Networks)

Dave Kerpen

This is an easy-to-read book for the small business owner and the aspiring entrepreneur who wants to get a basic knowledge of the key elements of a social marketing strategy and develop new marketing ideas.

Learn from a ton of examples how you can use social media in various use cases and situations.

23. The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

Guy Kawasaki, Peg Fitzpatrick

A book for beginner marketers who want to get some basic understanding and concepts. You will get an introduction to most social networks and how to use them.

If you are interested, go for the Kindle edition of this book as it contains some helpful links to apps and related content.

24. Hustle: The Power to Charge Your Life with Money, Meaning, and Momentum

Neil Patel, Patrick Vlaskowits, Jonas Koffler

This book comes from three people who are living the Hustle game – instead of a boring corporate career. They all failed or had some early life-changing experience. And they all learned how to build their dream life by working hard, daring the new and different and using the opportunities of the social web.

This might not be the best hands-on advice book that you can use as an action plan that you can follow. But you will get a ton of motivation and inspiration from this.

25. The Audience Revolution: The Smarter Way to Build a Business, Make a Difference, and Change the World

Danny Iny

Online Business is not about trying to market a product to an audience who may or may not care. Most online businesses are based on the “audience first” approach. With this approach, you build an audience in a niche and for this audience, you create products that they need, want and care about.

Danny Iny explains the audience-first approach and how it is going to change your business thinking and marketing strategy from the ground up!

26. Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media

Dan Gingiss

Customer care is a very important part of social media management. It is your chance of building a relationship, trust, get valuable feedback and engage with your customers.

This book explains how you can meet your audience on the channels of their choice. You learn everything you need to know about how to create a positive customer experience with real life examples.

If you work in customer care this book is a must read.

27. The Social Traffic Code

Jonathan Gebauer, Susanna Gebauer

Yes, this is a book written by me and Jonathan.

We give you a proven process to get reliable traffic from social media without paying for advertising. This book comes with step-by-step action plans to guide you to more traffic from social media within days – and you can scale this traffic success!

If you are looking for a place to start your social media traffic generation journey with a foolproof process and a thorough marketing plan, this book is for you!

28. The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising

Brian Meert

The step-by-step guide on how to manage your business ads on Facebook.

While we are not necessarily fans of advertising it is a practical way to reach social media and business success – if you have the necessary budget.

But Facebook advertising is not a process that you can set up easily without any knowledge. Use this book and get far better results for your good money than without.

This book includes a lot of screenshot graphics to explain everything and guide you through all the important steps.

29. Instagram For Business For Dummies

Jennifer Herman, Eric Butow, Corey Walker

No matter if you are a beginner or an advanced Instagram user, this book covers what you need to know for success with Instagram.

You get a ton of practical examples for all the major features and best practices.

If you want to get started with Instagram (or you are on Instagram but are not seeing results), this is the book you should get.

30. LinkedIn In 30 Minutes: How to create a rock-solid LinkedIn profile and build connections that matter

Angela Rose

LinkedIn often seems to be one of the most underutilized social networks. And many features and processes are not very common knowledge.

If you already are a LinkedIn Pro this book may not be your best choice. If you are a beginner trying to utilize LinkedIn this book can help you to optimize your profile and even increase traffic from LinkedIn

31. Grow Your Twitter Account Like A Pro

Jonathan Gebauer, Susanna Gebauer

For us, Twitter has been the key to building two businesses fast. We struggled for some time not understanding what it takes to get traffic and customers from Twitter. But we figured it out.

This book gives you the exact process not only we but some of the major social media influencers have used to build their traffic. We also show you a bunch of tricks and tweaks to easily multiply your marketing results from Twitter.

And the best thing? You can use tools to automate a lot of your Twitter marketing.

Which social media marketing books or books about related topics like content marketing did you recently read? Which books did give you the best advice to develop new marketing tactics? Did I miss any important social media marketing books? Which social media books can you recommend? Let us know in the comments!

And if you are looking for more great marketing books you might be interested in our list of awesome blogging books or these great digital marketing books.

Join our free Email Course to learn how to start your social media marketing journey:

All the basics in 4 Days, 4 Emails

Sharing is caring!