What is it?

Dell’s Social Media team has produced this guide for any small or medium businesses who are looking to embrace or further develop their use of social media. 

This guide looks at social media through the lens of small and medium business opportunities, with the core principles of online sharing and collaboration. It’s designed to be a practical resource for not only using social media professionally, but also personally in the context of how your employees can represent your company.

In creating this guide, we’ve drawn on experiences and insights from the Dell Small and Medium Business team and many of our friends and followers online. We hope you find it a useful resource and see your business grow through your efforts in social media.

Who is it for?

This guide is designed to provide you with a good basic knowledge of the social media landscape, an understanding of how businesses and consumers are using social media, and best practices and trends.

It will help:

• People who are new to social media engagement
• Users who are already engaged with other people via social media and who want to take their participation to the next level
• Business owners who are looking for some no-nonsense tips and best practices 

Why use it?

Social media is a collective term that describes a means of communicating and engaging with people. It’s something many people see as evolutionary, if not revolutionary, in helping people connect with each other in ways that are genuine, authentic and informal.

However you see it, social media usage is increasing rapidly and dramatically in all levels of society and in more countries around the world. It isn’t the domain only of geeks and the young. Increasingly, businesses of all shapes and sizes are embracing it.

What’s important isn’t so much the tools and the channels: It’s about people and new, simpler and more effective means of connecting with other people.

Now, online sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others attract hundreds of millions of people every day who share their lives and experiences. More business are developing homes in those places, too.

This guide will help you engage and interact more effectively online, by showing you how to:

• Leverage best social media practices
• Learn from the experiences of businesses who have leveraged social media
• Link online engagement to measurable objectives specific to your goals

How do you use it?

Because this guide is presented in a modular format, with easy-to-find sections that address the topics in an easy-to-understand manner, you will be able to adopt and adapt these practices, strategies and tactics in a manner consistent with your personal interest, objectives planning and business needs.

Please note the following about the social media toolkit:

This Social Media Toolkit does not cover all social media channels and networks. Instead it focuses on the essential ones for small and medium-size businesses seeking effective engagement with their stakeholders via social media. While we have researched and used publicly available information available at the time of preparing this content (January 2012), we would point out that social media tools and channels and information change, services will evolve and, in some cases or circumstances, cease to be available or continue availability in a form or manner different to how this material portrays them.

All information you see in this publication is provided as is, with no warranty or guarantee of accuracy. While we have taken care in our research when preparing this content, it is your responsibility to satisfy yourself of any regulatory, legal, or other issues that should be addressed in or prior to your use of social media. Dell cannot and does not take responsibility for how you use the information presented here.

Finally, note that the information in this publication does not reflect the opinion, business policy, practice or any other aspect of business activity of Dell Corporation or its employees, unless otherwise stated.

For more information about the Social Media Toolkit, and for additional and updated content, please visit http://www.dell.co.uk/business/socialmedia.

Copyright 2012 Dell Corporation. Except where noted otherwise, content in this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License.