The 23 Best Social Media Marketing Books For More Marketing Success

It is summer. Some of us have some free time to chill, sit in the sun – and read some 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 books for the advanced marketers as well as for beginners. There are books with very actionable advice and step-by-step instructions to social media marketing success. 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 book that can help you to get better results from your social media marketing efforts!

Mark Schaefer

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

Andrew and Pete

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

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 breathes content marketing. He may not have invented it, but he certainly knows how to put content to great use – and what kind of content it takes!

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.

Robert McKee

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 tips from this book may be a little too basic for you.

Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah

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

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.

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.

Dave Kerpen

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

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.

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.

Danny Iny

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

Dan Gingiss

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.

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, this book is for you!

Brian Meert

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.

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.

Angela Rose

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

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? Did I miss any important marketing books? Which social media books can you recommend? Let us know in the comments!

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