Social media, with its global reach and exposure, is something businesses can’t ignore. However, for some business owners, social media involves the 3 C’s: complication, complexity and confusing. Dealing with these 3 C’s should not be a reason business owners stay away from social media though. And for one good reason: Your customers are there. They aren’t there just sharing what they eat and drink. They are discussing your business. They are expressing needs and opportunities your business can fulfill. Social media isn’t a fad or a trend. It’s a business reality.

That’s why this list of nine social media marketing books was created. It is designed to give you a peek into the basic social media marketing strategies of the pros. Using these strategies, you can learn how to spread your messages to your customers in the most productive way possible.

Social Media Marketing Books

If you’re ready to jump in, here goes.

Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses: A Simple Guide To Getting More Out Of Your Online Marketing Strategy

by Michael Goggs

Social media marketing is difficult for large businesses, so what can a small business hope to accomplish? It turns out quite a bit. Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses is a simplified guide for small business owners who feel overwhelmed in social media marketing. As many business owners can attest, the problem isn’t using social media.

It’s using social media to achieve a profitable result at the end.

Michael Goggs wrote a book about his marketing experiences while pursuing that goal. He wasn’t a social media expert when he dived into social media marketing. He was just a guy who had to figure it all out.

His book shares the lessons he learned and fundamentals he relied on to launch and grow his business from his first Tweet onward.

If you’re looking for a social media guide written from the perspective of a small business owner instead of another “expert”, this book might be the guide you’re looking for.

Text Me! Snap Me! Ask Me Anything!: How Entrepreneurs, Consultants And Artists Can Use The Power Of Intimate Attention To Build Their Brand, Grow Their Business And Change The World

by Kevin Kruse

How do you get attention for your business in a crowded marketplace? Don’t use the same strategies everyone else does. As author Kevin Kuse points out in his book Text Me! Snap Me! Ask Me Anything! the world of social media marketing is getting more and more crowded every day.

Text Me! Snap me! is a guide to breaking through that noise using specific strategies designed to grow your social media presence quickly without spending hours a day to do it.

The book focuses on specific strategies for social media channels designed to help small business owners stay relevant with their particular audience instead of praying for help from the masses.

Kevin Kruse argues the key to becoming relevant to your intended audience is to pay attention to your audience.

His book shows business owners (and anyone needing to make an impact) what things to pay attention to so they can stay relevant with the people that matter the most.

Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies

by Jan Zimmerman and Deborah Ng

Sometimes you need a book to give abroad overview of social media marketing. Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, published earlier this year, is just such a book.

Social Media Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, which is a condensed collection of 9 other social media marketing books, helps business owners make sense of the growing social media world.

This social media world is already a daily reality for over 2 billion people and is projected to grow at any increasing rate each year.

Social media, in other words, is a big deal for businesses.

The book introduces readers to the major social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Unlike other “social media for beginners” books, this title focuses on the business application of using social media.

Readers aren’t just reading about how to make a cute post on Instagram. They are are learning how to turn that post into a profitable asset for their businesses.

Free Range Brands

by Nicole Ertas

Branding isn’t what it used to be.

A couple decades ago, branding was also about size and scale.

The business that could open up the most stores or create the most products with its brand usually won. Advertising was a one-sided communication where a business told the masses what they needed to know.

That world is fading.

Social media and everything internet-related has dramatically changed the world of branding. It’s much more nuanced, more complicated, but also more engaging for both businesses and consumers.

This new world can be interesting and confusing, which is where Free Range Brands comes to help.

This book, written by a branding guru, helps business owners understand the fundamentals of branding in the new age, a period author Nicole Ertas calls the age of the “free range brands.”

Employer Branding for Dummies

by Richard Mosley and Lars Schmidt

The majority of branding advice you will find as a business owner will focus on external customers, either those from another business (B2B) or consumers (B2C).

One group of customers that many businesses tend to forget about are the internal customers, current and prospective employees. Employer branding directly affects your business’s ability to attract and retain talent. It also affects the morale of those currently working for you.

Employer Branding for Dummies was written to help fix that oversight.

The book helps business owners understand why they need to maintain and protect their branding as an employer. It also helps businesses integrate employer branding into their overall marketing strategy.

Businesses need to learn to market to all of their customers, not just the external customers who click on a Tweet or Like a Facebook post. Employer Branding for Dummies covers almost everything you need to watch out for while optimizing your employer brands from the “careers” side of your website to the engagement efforts you use in the workplace to energize your workers.

KNOWN: The Handbook for Building and Unleashing Your Personal Brand in the Digital Age

by Mark Schaefer

As everyone knows, attention is now the new currency for marketers.

Marketers need to their audience’s attention and make an impact in order to reach your potential customers.

There are a lot of books on how to attract you potential audience’s attention, but what are you supposed to do next? Known by social media guru Mark Schaefer addresses the answer.

Whatever personal or professional goal you have, it will require attention and influence. Schaefer offers his advice for achieving both of these objectives in a world with a short attention span and a lot of options to choose from.

His book provides specific strategies and recommendations for making a strong and lasting impact in order to thrive in today’s world.

Known helps readers craft an online presence that optimize your value proposition so that you can put your best foot forward and get the right kind of attention in this world crowded with an ever-increasing number of ways to communicate.

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

by Dan Gingiss

Advice on social media marketing tends to focus on how businesses get their message out to customers.

It doesn’t address with the information coming back in. We’re talking about customer service. Like almost every industry, customer service has been turned on its head.

Customers can now talk directly to your business and indirectly about your business with other customers, your competitors, and the world. This places businesses in a unique situation.

To help your business figure out how to address this changing world of customer service author Dan Gingiss, social customer service guru, helps business owners upgrade their philosophy, train customer service agents, and scale the process to take the lead in customer service.

His book helps readers cover every step of the customer service journey from the quick Tweet of an angry customer to the powerful stories of customer service professionals who used social media to go above and beyond the call of duty.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

by Derek Thompson

If you heard anything about social media, you’ve undoubtedly heard of “going viral”. While most of us still don’t understand what it means, we still feel the temptation to go after that goal.

Hit Makers challenges this view. This book points to something more complex and long-lasting than “going viral”. Popularity is the ultimate intent of “viral” that marketers and business owners often miss. In the chase for something viral, what they really want is something popular.

Popularity isn’t something that a person can just engineer. There are plenty of connections that have to be made before something is considered “popular” in a society.

Hit Makers explores these links and why those links led to the rise of cultural icons like Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.

If you’ve ever wanted to dig deeper into the cultural influences that turn a seemingly simple idea into something that transforms a society, this book will lead you down the “rabbit hole” to find the answer.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

by David Meerman Scott

Sometimes you need a  book that covers almost everything you can do online to gain exposure for your book. The New Rules of Marketing and PR comes pretty close to fulfilling that need. This international best-seller featuring marketing and PR strategies is back in a fourth edition.

In this new version of the book, Scott explores how to integrate social media into an integrated marketing and public relations campaign.

To do this right, businesses have to learn the new rules of marketing and PR that focus on reaching select audiences with a specific message. Businesses also have to learn which tools they need to achieve their objective.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR is a guide to the variety of strategies and options that business owners have to reach their audiences whether they are on social media, watching the news, reading a blog, or using an app.

Social Media & PR Complex, But Basic Principles Will Never Change

Looking over this list and all of the different types of social media channels and tools out there (including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Periscope and so much more), you might get overwhelmed by all that you have to figure out just to tell people about your business. Try not to focus on that! You can’t control social media. It will continue to evolve with or without you.

To make sure that you move with social media and not against it (which definitely is not good for your business!), take a moment to peruse through some of the social media marketing books on the list above. You will find a multitude of strategies for almost every social network there is. You will also find something else, the common theme that runs through everything tool is people. No matter what marketing channel we use, we’re still doing the same thing. We tell people about our awesome business. Focus on the foundation and you may not be as lost on social media as you might expect.

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This article, “9 Books to Help Unlock Awesome Social Media and PR Powers for Your Business” was first published on Small Business Trends