Social Media Books You Have To Read Today

Are you looking for a few good books to improve your social media marketing?

The best social media managers, always seek out opportunities to learn more. This can be achieved by attending social media courses Johannesburg thus attaining learning new skills and transforming their knowledge into experiences in a digital world.

In this article, you’ll discover 11 books to help you improve your social media marketing activities.

Youtility

Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype

If you’re wondering how to make your products seem more exciting online, you’re asking the wrong question. You’re not competing for attention only against other similar products. You’re competing against your customers’ friends and family and viral videos and cute puppies.

To win attention these days you must ask a different question: How can we help?”

Jay Baer’s Youtility offers a new approach that cuts through the clut­ter: marketing that is truly, inherently useful. If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life.

Drawing from real examples of companies who are practising Youtility, a social media strategy book, as well as his experience helping more than seven hundred brands improve their marketing strategy, Baer provides a groundbreaking plan for using information and helpfulness to transform the relationship between companies and customers.

About Jay Baer
Jay Baer is a marketing and customer service expert, and the New York Times best-selling author of six books.
He is President of the global consulting firm Convince & Convert and has advised some of the most iconic organizations in the world, including Nike, Allstate, The United Nations, Oracle, and 35 of the FORTUNE 500.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook

How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World

New York Times bestselling author and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk shares hard-won advice on how to connect with customers and beat the competition. A mash-up of the best elements of Crush It! and The Thank You Economy with a fresh spin, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is a blueprint to social media marketing strategies that really work.

When managers and marketers outline their social media strategies, they plan for the “right hook”—their next sale or campaign that’s going to knock out the competition. Even companies committed to jabbing—patiently engaging with customers to build the relationships crucial to successful social media campaign books—want to land the punch that will take down their opponent or their customer’s resistance in one blow. Right hooks convert traffic to sales and easily show results. Except when they don’t.

Thanks to massive change and proliferation in social media platforms, the winning combination of jabs and right hooks is different now. Vaynerchuk shows that while communication is still key, context matters more than ever.

It’s not just about developing high-quality content or reading social media campaign books, but developing high-quality content perfectly adapted to specific social media platforms and mobile devices—content tailor-made for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr.

About Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk builds businesses. Fresh out of college he took his family wine business and grew it from a $3M to a $60M business in just five years.

Now he runs VaynerMedia, one of the world’s hottest digital agencies. Along the way he became a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist, investing in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, and Birchbox before eventually co-founding VaynerRSE, a $25M investment fund.

Engage! 

The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web

The ultimate guide to branding and building your business in the era of the Social Web, one of the best social media business books—revised and updated with a Foreword by Ashton Kutcher.

Engage! thoroughly examines the social media landscape and how to effectively use social media to succeed in business—one network and one tool at a time. One of the best social media business books to read, it leads you through the detailed and specific steps required for conceptualizing, implementing, managing, and measuring a social media program. The result is the ability to increase visibility, build communities of loyal brand enthusiasts, and increase profits.

Covering everything you need to know about social media marketing and the rise of the new social consumer, Engage! shows you how to create effective strategies based on proven examples and earn buy-in from your marketing teams. Even better, you’ll learn how to measure success and ROI.

Today, no business can afford to ignore the social media revolution. If you’re not using social media to reach out to your customers and the people who influence them, who is?

About Brian Solis
Brian Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders in business innovation. As a digital analyst, anthropologist, and futurist, he studies disruptive technology and its impact on business and society.

More so, through his research reports, articles and social media books, he humanizes technology’s causal effect to help people see people differently and understand what to do about it.

The Zen of Social Media Marketing

An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue

The Essential How-To Guide for Social Media Marketing by Leading Expert Shama Hyder, Named “Social media’s zen master of marketing” by Entrepreneur magazine and one of LinkedIn’s “Top Voices” in Marketing & Social in 2015

In 2001, at the dawn of the millennium—and the digital marketing age—the first edition of The Zen of Social Media Marketing became a global hit. In the ensuing years, updated editions of one of the best social media marketing books 2019, helped even more marketers, entrepreneurs, students, and professionals of all types navigate the sometimes-stressful world of social media.

Now, this new, fully updated edition offers timely insight into the ways social media marketing has changed and specific steps to show you exactly how to thrive and profit with ease and efficiency.

Whether you’re a novice, struggler, or mastery-seeker, you already know that engaging in social media is no longer optional. People are talking about your company online and you need to be part of those conversations. However, social media marketing isn’t like traditional marketing—and treating it that way only leads to frustration and failure.

In The Zen of Social Media Marketing, Shama Hyder, social media expert and president of The Marketing Zen Group, teaches you the “Zen” of using social media tools to find your own marketing nirvana.

About Shama Hyder
Shama Hyder is a visionary strategist for the digital age. A web and TV personality, a bestselling author of social media marketing books, and the award-winning CEO of The Marketing Zen Group–a global online marketing and digital PR company, she has aptly been dubbed the “Zen Master of Marketing” by Entrepreneur Magazine and the “Millennial Master of the Universe” by FastCompany.com.

Under her leadership, The Marketing Zen Group has grown to include a team of 30 and serve clients ranging from publicly-held Fortune 500 companies to privately-held small businesses and nonprofit organizations across the globe.

Optimize

How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing

Optimize is designed to give readers a practical approach to integrating search and social media optimization with content marketing to boost relevance, visibility, and customer engagement.

Companies, large and small,  and one of the best books for social media community managers will benefit from the practical planning and creative content marketing tactics in this book that has been proven to increase online performance across marketing, public relations, and customer service.

Learn to incorporate essential content optimization and social media engagement principles thereby increasing their ability to acquire and engage relevant customers online.

Optimize, a social media for business book, provides insights from Lee Odden, one of the leading authorities on Content and Online Marketing.

About Lee Odden
Lee Odden is the author of many social media influencer books and the exceptional book Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing.

He is also the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing and online PR agency that specializes in a 360-degree approach to growing new business and enriching both brand and community engagement online.

Inbound Marketing

Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online

Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online is a comprehensive guide and social media management books, to increasing online visibility and engagement. Written by top marketing and startup bloggers, this is one of the best social media books for small business. It contains the latest information about customer behaviour and preferred digital experiences.

From the latest insights on lead nurturing and visual marketing to advice on producing remarkable content by building tools, readers will gain the information they need to transform their marketing online.

With outbound marketing methods becoming less effective, the time to embrace inbound marketing is now. Cold calling, e-mail blasts, and direct mail are turning consumers off to an ever-greater extent, so consumers are increasingly doing research online to choose companies and products that meet their needs.

Inbound Marketing, one of the best social media books 2019, recognizes these behavioural changes as opportunities and explains how marketers can make the most of this shift online. This not only addresses turning strangers into website visitors, but explains how best to convert those visitors to leads, and to nurture those leads to the point of becoming delighted customers.

About Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh is the founder and CTO of HubSpot. HubSpot provides marketing and sales software. The company, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has over 11,000 customers in 70 countries.

The Art of Social Media

Power Tips for Power Users

By now it’s clear that whether you’re promoting a business, a product, or yourself, social media and reading social media marketing top books, is near the top of what determines your success or failure. And there are countless pundits, authors, and consultants eager to advise you.

But there’s no one quite like Guy Kawasaki, the legendary former chief evangelist for Apple and one of the pioneers of business blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Tumbling, and much, much more.

Now Guy has teamed up with Peg Fitzpatrick, who he says is the best social-media person he’s ever met, to offer The Art of Social Media—the one essential guide you need to get the most bang for your time, effort, and money.

With over one hundred practical tips, tricks, and insights, Guy and Peg present a bottom-up strategy to produce a focused, thorough, and compelling presence on the most popular social media platforms.

They guide you through steps to build your foundation, amass your digital assets, optimize your profile, attract more followers, and effectively integrate social media and blogging.

For beginners overwhelmed by too many choices as well as seasoned professionals eager to improve their game, The Art of Social Media is full of tactics that have been proven to work in the real world. Or as Guy puts it, “great stuff, no fluff.”

About Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple, and one of the world’s top social media marketing books authors.

He is also the author of APE, What the Plus!, Enchantment, and his extensive list of social media books include nine other books. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Epic Content Marketing

How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less. Reach more customers than ever with TARGETED CONTENT

Epic Content Marketing helps you develop strategies that seize the competitive edge by creating messages and “stories” tailored for instant, widespread distribution on social media, Google, and the mainstream press.

It provides a step-by-step plan for developing powerful content that resonates with customers and describes best practices for social media sharing and search engine discoverability.

Simply put, it’s about developing valuable content, building an audience around that content, and then creating a product for that audience. Notice a shift?

Author Joe Pulizzi flips the traditional entrepreneurial approach of first creating a product and then trying to find customers. It’s a brilliant reverse-engineering of a model that rarely succeeds. The radical six-step business-building process revealed in this book is smart, simple, practical, and cost-effective. And best of all, it works.

It’s a strategy Pulizzi used to build his own successful company, Content Marketing Institute, which has landed on Inc. magazine’s list of fastest-growing private companies for three years straight.

It’s also a strategy countless other entrepreneurs use to build their own multi-million dollar companies. Build an audience and you’ll be able to sell pretty much anything you want.

A pioneer of content marketing, Pulizzi has cracked to code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work.

About Joe Pulizzi
Joe Pulizzi is a content marketing strategist, speaker and founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which runs the largest physical content marketing event in North America, Content Marketing World.

Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, speaker, author of social media strategy books, and podcaster. He’s the founder of multiple startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014 and 2015.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR

How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, Newsjacking, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. The international bestseller—now in a new edition.

When it comes to marketing, anything goes in the Digital Age, right? Well, not quite. While marketing and public relations tactics do seem to change overnight, every smart businessperson knows that it takes a lot more than the ‘next big thing.’

The New Rules of Marketing & PR is an international bestseller with more than 375,000 copies sold in twenty-nine languages.

In the latest edition of this pioneering guide to the future of marketing, you’ll get a step-by-step action plan for leveraging the power of the latest approaches to generating attention for your idea or your business.

You’ll learn how to get the right information to the right people at the right time—at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

The Internet continues to change the way people communicate and interact with each other, and if you’re struggling to keep up with what’s trending in social media, online videos, apps, blogs, or more, your product or service is bound to get lost in the ether.

In The New Rules of Marketing & PR, you’ll get access to the tried-and-true rules that will keep you ahead of the curve when using the latest and greatest digital spaces to their fullest PR, marketing, and customer-communications potential.

Keeping in mind that your audience is savvy and crunched for time, this essential guide shows you how to cut through the online clutter to ensure that your message gets seen and heard.

About David Meerman Scott
David Meerman Scott is an internationally acclaimed sales and marketing strategist whose high-energy presentations are a treat for the senses. He also is on the best seller social media books list.

That he’s spoken on all seven continents and in 40 countries to audiences of the most respected firms, organizations and associations underscore the value he brings to audiences.

This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See

A game-changing approach to marketing, sales, and advertising.

Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketing to Purple Cow to Tribes to The Dip.

Now, for the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing, the best social media marketing books, shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation.

Great marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems. Their tactics rely on empathy, connection, and emotional labour instead of attention-stealing ads and spammy email funnels.

No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it’s presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it.

You can do work that matters for people who care. These top-selling social media books show you the way.

About Seth Godin
Seth is the author of nineteen international bestsellers that have been translated into over 35 languages, and have changed the way people think about marketing and work.

For a long time, Unleashing the Ideavirus was the most popular ebook ever published, and Purple Cow is the bestselling marketing book of the decade.

What do you think? Have you read any of these books? What other books have you read recently that have helped you improve your social media marketing? Please share your comments below.

If you are looking for ways to upskill yourself in social media marketing then attend our Social Media Courses Johannesburg.

TOPIC: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING