What The 20 Best Social Media Marketing Books Teach
Are you just dabbling in social media marketing? How’s that working out for you?
If you’re not building a superstar following, getting customers to take action, and building an indestructible brand, then you’re going to love what we have for you right here.
It’s the 20 best social media marketing books, and the lessons in each you can apply to your business.
Just as any great chef needs a recipe and any wizard needs a spell book, here’s your list to dominate on social.
Best Social Media Marketing Books
1. Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too
Success is often found in the road less traveled. In Crushing It!, Gary Vaynerchuk teaches you how you can find success through unconventional methods.
Vaynerchuk focuses on establishing a personal brand and incorporating it with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others.
Featuring stories of real entrepreneurs, Vaynerchuk really emphasizes “living life on your own terms”. What better way than to establish a personal brand where fans and customers are attracted to you?
I feel like the luckiest guy in the world. I had to learn the skills I needed and become competent enough to match my confidence, but the thing that surprises me the most is learning that it’s not about how much you know; it’s about how much you care. We can create anything we want to if we have the passion, the energy, the hustle, and commitment to our vision. If I had been a jerk all along the way and I didn’t care about people, there’s no chance I would have been able to do this.
2. The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users
It can be tempting to blow a lot of money on social media ads with organic reach significantly decreasing. Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist for Apple, offers you his insight on how to get the most out of your social marketing.
Kawasaki walks readers through the entire process of social media marketing and how to amass a large following.
He also discusses techniques to writing an interesting blog and then incorporating it into your social media. If you’re looking for social media marketing books that will provide you with a bottom-up approach to the topic, you will enjoy this read.
In our opinion, most search engine optimization (SEO) is bullshit. It involves trying to read Google’s mind and then gaming the system to make Google find crap. There are three thousand computer science PhDs at Google trying to make each search relevant, and then there’s you trying to fool them. Who’s going to win? Tricking Google is futile. Instead, you should let Google do what it does best: find great content. So defy all the SEO witchcraft out there and focus on creating, curating, and sharing great content. This is what’s called SMO: social-media optimization.
3. Freakishly Effective Social Media for Network Marketing: How to Stop Wasting Your Time on Things That Don’t Work and Start Doing What Does!
Network marketing relies on independent sales people to sell products and recruit other sales people. A very common business that follows this model is Scentsy. They have people that do not directly work for the company selling their candles and recruiting other people to join their efforts in selling these products.
Ray and Jessica Higdon recognized that a lot of network marketers are still struggling to effectively utilize social media. Marketers, whether in the network marketing space or not, can end up causing a lot of harm to their business if they try to engage with social media without truly knowing how to effectively use each app.
Social media marketing is a lot different than traditional marketing and requires different approaches when it comes to producing content. Read it and execute.
All things being equal, people prefer to do business with people they know, like, and trust.
4. Likeable Social Media, Third Edition: How To Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, & Be Generally Amazing On All Social Networks That Matter
Why spend time and money for no one to follow you, or worse, follow and then unfollow a week later? Gaining followers really is only half the battle. True success on social media depends on the retention rates of your followers.
Michelle Greenbaum and Rob Berk will teach you how to create your personal brand to keep your followers around. This book goes beyond advice. They share various case studies about retaining followers to show how other people were able to gain success using the techniques outlined in the book.
You’ll appreciate the newer social media platforms, like Snapchat, mixed in with older platforms for a full strategy.
Sure, not everyone who posts on your Facebook wall or tweets about you has as much sway or trendsetting ability as some celebrities, but they certainly can spread the word on your behalf—easily and quickly—especially if you thank and encourage them. (Some users probably have more online influence than some so-called celebrities too!)
5. Win: The Key Principles To Take Your Business From Ordinary To Extraordinary
Communication separates thriving businesses from failing ones. And the goal of communication is to ensure that your marketing efforts are clear for the reader to understand what it is your selling and why they should buy it.
Frank Luntz shares 9 essential principles of communication that can be applied to any situation.
Put your business through the test to see if you follow these principles in your communication. If you’re not successful, you now know why.
This social media marketing book is a double recommendation, as Brian included this book on his top 30 best marketing books list.
Winners recognize that even when they aren’t physically selling a product, they are always selling themselves. Every human interaction is an opportunity to connect—and then to sell.
6. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World
Another Gary Vee special. This one focuses on social media storytelling.
Why the second book about social media? Is he trying to dominate the social media marketing books industry?
He’d say what you once knew to be true about social media will very likely change in a few months time.
Now, the content you produce has to be appropriately tailored to fit the social media platform you’re posting on. The best Pinterest content looks different than Twitter content, for example. And you have to be in the know, or suffer irrelevance and a loss of conversions.
Your number-one job is to tell your story to the consumer wherever they are, and preferably at the moment they are deciding to make a purchase.
7. Buy.ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
We all would be nowhere without our buyers.
Tired of losing sales to your competitors? Listen to Martin Lindstrom to first understand, then attract new customers.
Lindstrom discusses his findings from a 3-year long neuromarketing study that looked at brain activity while participants were shown ads and had interactions with brands.
The goal of this study was to truly understand the buyer and what actually motivates their decisions. Surprisingly, the results challenged what many marketers have always thought about buyers and decision making. It’ll challenge what you know to be true about consumer behavior.
Read this book because it’s only what you don’t know, that you think you do, that gets you in the most trouble.
When we brand things, our brains perceive them as more special and valuable than they actually are.
8. Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less
You can produce as much content as you want. If the consumer is not interested in seeing it, it won’t matter how much you put out.
Joe Pulizzi recognizes this truth about marketing and spills the beans on what content consumers actually desire.
Today, interrupting a user’s usual content with an ad that they have no interest in seeing is a red flag. Fans will hate it and remember your injustice, damaging your brand equity.
Nowadays, you have to master the art of the sublime to truly produce successful content. Think a carefully placed Coca-Cola bottle in an influencer’s Instagram picture.
You will learn how to get users to buy your products without actually telling them to buy your product.
Pulizzi offers various case studies that showcase what is considered acceptable content. Your content needs to establish some sort of trust between you and the consumer because that is what users value. Explaining why you can’t outwardly advertise to them and be extremely profitable.
Content marketing without a loyal audience is not content marketing at all.
9. The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue
I hope by now in this list you’ve recognized that engaging in social media marketing is no longer optional.
Shama Hyder recognizes that there has to be two different approaches to social media marketing and traditional marketing. I’m going to assume that your company is still using traditional marketing, so you will get the best of both worlds with this book.
This book discusses how to use a variety of social media tools to make social media marketing a stress-free experience. You can use these tools to cause your social media to thrive.
Implement these tactics with grace and ease.
Today, you need a multipronged approach. You can’t reach a demographic through one channel. You have to reach people through the channel of their choice.
10. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
Have you thought about developing your voice by telling stories through your content?
Using stories will help establish your brand as authentic and encourage users to care about your every post. And authenticity is huge for building a loyal fan base.
You will be asked to think about why you even generate content in the first place. We’ll be quick to tell you that if you don’t understand why you’re generating content, you won’t be successful.
Every business has a story, and this book helps you understand how to use that story to your advantage.
When we say to be authentic, we mean you should make it clear that your stuff has the stamp of an actual person or actual people and that that person or those people have the qualities (a point of view, a personality, a sense of enthusiasm for the subject, and suitability to your audience) that make for a compelling approach to content as a solid foundation for the start of your relationship with your audience.
11. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
I’m assuming you’re a business owner, marketer, entrepreneur, or a manager. Ann Handley is here to remind you that you’re also a writer.
How can this be? If you are generating content of any kind, you are a writer. You make conscious choices about what words to use, how to cater to your audience and many other decisions that writers make daily.
All of the marketing you will ever do relies on words. Words are what establishes your voice and tells your customers who you are. Even if it is produced in the form of audio or video, it starts with a word.
Believe it or not, we rely on words to distinguish ourselves from our competitors and develop our online personas. You will learn about the importance of word choice and how to apply it to your own business.
So, before you begin the writing, be sure you know the purpose or mission or objective of every piece of content that you write. What are you trying to achieve? What information, exactly, are you trying to communicate? And why should your audience care?
12. Content That Converts: How to Build a Profitable And Predictable B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Creating new, unique content everyday can be a lot of work. Laura Hanly teaches you the benefits of creating a predictable content marketing strategy.
You’ll start by defining your audience and sending them a clear message that conveys what your business stands for, what you’re offering and what value it will bring to their lives. Hanly discusses how to use the content plan you develop to become an industry leader. This is an extremely valuable set of tools she is offering.
Next, you’ll learn content distribution in the mission of generating the maximum amount of leads possible. Don’t be surprised when you become an industry leader.
To develop any successful marketing strategy, you need to have a clear picture of the goals in your business. This is particularly true of content marketing: sitting down to bang out anything that pops into your head is not a sensible way to approach it. You need to have a consistent strategy for the content you’re producing, so that your audience is engaged.
13. One Million Followers: How I Built a Massive Social Following In 30 Days: Growth Hacks for Your Business, Your Message, And Your Brand From The World’s Greatest Minds
There is more than 60 billion messages sent on different platforms everyday. But Brendan Kane doesn’t care about the competition and explains how to cut through the noise.
The rise of influencer marketing has completely changed the social media game in the past few years. Kane recognizes this change and has dedicated his career to finding the best tools to turn any account into an influencer account.
You will learn how to gain an authentic customer base that is engaged with your content. Some of the top influencers on social media drastically increased their own following using this exact advice.
If one million followers sounds like a lot and you’re looking for a more attainable, short term goal, we have a post on how to increase your Instagram following by 1,000 followers.
When one person shares your message, your exposure and range grows exponentially – it eventually reaches hundreds of their friends and can potentially reach their friends’ friends as well. The velocity at which you get people to share your content dictates the success of your organic growth. This also means the more people sharing, the quicker you grow.
14. Social Media Marketing Mastery 2019: 3 Books in 1: How To Build a Brand And Become An Expert Influencer Using Facebook, Twitter, Youtube & Instagram – Top Digital Networking & Personal Branding Strategies
The most prevalent aspects of social media marketing are influencers, platform specific marketing and how to build your personal brand. Robert Miller has covered all of those aspects in this 3-in-1 book.
The first book in this guide is How to become an Influencer. In this one, you learn how to become an influencer. Not only that, you see why consumers respond well to influencers because it feels less like advertising and more like talking with a friend about what they recommend to buy. One of the best ways to advertise is word of mouth and becoming an influencer will help get the word of your product out in the world.
The second book is Power of Instagram Marketing.
Instagram can sometimes be an underutilized platform and he argues that there is great value in building a strong presence on the app.
The final book in this series is How to Build your Personal Brand.
You will find a different perspective on developing your personal brand which can then be used to establish your voice on social media.
Do keep this in mind: businesses can do well without social media. They can make a profit, and break even. But if you want to continue growing, if you want to constantly be improving sales and making more money, if you want to improve your relationship with your customers and engage with them while at the same time not spending too much money, social media is a great way to do this.
15. The Content Code: Six Essential Strategies To Ignite Your Content, Your Marketing, And Your Business
One of the most frustrating parts of social media marketing can be having to start over after building a following. Schaefer saves the day by telling you that you can build strong social media from the accounts you already have and taking them to the next level.
It can be easy to get lost in the excitement of gaining new followers that you lose sight of what you’re doing in the first place. Once you understand the true value of social media, you will learn how to gain achievable results with your social media efforts.
Follow Schaefer’ss 6 digital secrets to fire up your followers to take action.
The future is more than copy writing. The future of marketing is copy igniting.
16. Instagram Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Following Fast, Driving Massive Traffic & Generating Predictable Profits
Jeremy McGilvrey is here to challenge what you already know about social media marketing by focusing on two things:
- Building a large following fast
- Converting followers into dollars
McGilvrey understands itt can be easy to get wrapped up in the popularity game of Instagram and focus solely on gaining followers. McGilvrey will take you a step further and teach you how to convert those followers into dollars.
The amount of followers you get doesn’t matter if you aren’t increasing your profits. Turning those followers into profitable leads is where the magic happens.
All of this was possible because of two simple things that are unique to Instagram. The first is that you can drive traffic at speeds that will blow your mind. The second is that unlike other social media platforms, you have no limitations on what you can put on your promotions. That’s why Instagram is a gold mine and a marketers dream come true!
17. 500 Social Media Marketing Tips: Essential Advice, Hints and Strategy for Business: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, and More!
Implementing a campaign on social media means you have to focus on consistency. Andrew Macarthy will give you 500 actionable strategies for effective social media marketing in his book.
If you were wondering how to approach each platform differently, this is the book for you. This book covers strategies for nearly all platforms you could potentially start marketing on.
You don’t have to read it cover to cover to get all the necessary information you need to successfully implement the strategies. Pick and use what feels right.
With the purchase of this book, you are also given access to YouTube tutorials that support the strategies Macarthy presents.
Implement all 500 tips and you have no idea how much your life can change.
Depending on the type of business you run, not every social media site is going to suit your marketing, your audience, or what you are trying to achieve.
18. Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media
The world of influencers is extremely unpredictable. Brittany Hennessy has analyzed the evolution of influencers and offers advice on becoming famous in this sense.
She goes over core influencer principles that you will need to apply to your own account to claim the title of influencer. Some of these principles are influenced by the research she has done about where she predicts influencer marketing will go in the future. Influencer marketing can be tricky to succeed at and Hennessy is here to help you figure out the world of being an influencer in this social media marketing book.
You’ve probably scrolled through Instagram and thought to yourself, “I could totally do that,” but you might not realize that there is an art and a science to becoming a full-time influencer.
19. Everything You Need To Know About Social Media: Without Having To Call A Kid
Are you an older gentleman or woman? Social media is naturally harder on you than your kids who have grown up with social media.
Greta Van Susteren recognizes this discrepancy and is here to help older generations navigate this unfamiliar territory. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to master all of the major platforms.
This is a simple guide that can be a great place to start when you’re first starting out with social media marketing. If you understand and master the skills presented in this book, you will have a strong foundation to start applying some of the more complex ideas presented in the other social media marketing books.
We are living through a revolution. This revolution is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, bigger than the automotive revolution, bigger than the great space race. This revolution isn’t just changing how we do things, or where we can go, or how we work. It is fundamentally changing how we communicate with and relate to one another.
20. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
Understanding how people work and view social media is the key to running a successful social media marketing strategy. It’s also a key to business, relationship, and life success.
Matthew D. Lieberman ran studies on the brains of participants to understand how the brain socializes.
Liberman found that our brain works to understand others and our relationship with those people. Our brains our wired to connect with other people. This is the draw of these platforms. Social media gives us a place to connect with lots of people, especially people that we probably would not have been able to connect with regularly.
Understanding why people use social media will help you market like a genius.
As we have said from the beginning, we think people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.
Conclusion
Real talk: The knowledge you gain from reading these social media marketing books will be useless if you don’t apply it to your business.
The point of reading these books is to increase your knowledge and apply it. One without the other is a complete waste of time.
Think of these books as tools to improve your social media marketing strategy. Just as a house doesn’t get built if you don’t start laying cement and bricks, your social following and cash flow doesn’t move until you put in the work to apply what you’ve learned.
What is your favorite social media marketing book?
