Social Media & Cake : A Recipe For Success For Women With Small Businesses

Kat Thompson from Beverley based business katproductions Ltd has hit upon the idea of making learning the basics of social media easy and fun by delivering her courses with lashings of cake and coffee.

All served of course in vintage tea-cups and floral plates. She now runs regular courses including Twitter, Pinterest, SEO, Facebook, LinkedIn and business blogging and loves the fact that course after course proves that social media and women are a match made in heaven.

Kat says “Solely relying on a website these days is not enough and social media is becoming an increasingly important way of engaging your business with your customers whether that be on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Using social media well will not only illustrate what your business does but can also reveal the personality behind it and people respond to this human interaction. And I generally find women are really good at doing this.”

After presenting various social media related talks and workshops for the womens’ networking groups Women in Enterprise and Business and previous to that, Meet!, Kat realised that teaching to small, friendly and informal groups was conducive to producing a great learning environment especially once tea and cake were involved. Cake seems to have the effect of making a workshop less intimidating and helps people relax and learn.

In June 2012 she ran a pilot course where a group of six women sat around a table and in two hours had learnt the basics of how to use Twitter for their businesses as well as having made new friends and business contacts in the process. It was such a success that she immediately set about running courses in all the main social media applications and these too have worked very well.

Carol Atkinson from the Straw Cottage said “The course was a great introduction to Twitter. And it was so useful to be able to sit around the table and have a go. It increased my confidence no end and the lemon drizzle cake was a bonus!”

Each course is run as a two hour workshop with a focus on learning and doing the basics, sharing ideas and experiences and of course eating cake.

The courses are particularly well suited for those women who are either moving back into the workforce and are either running or setting up a new business and need to know how to make their on-line presence really work.

The social media courses are being held in Beverley, East Yorkshire over the next few weeks and will be re-run throughout the year. More information is available at www.katproductions.co.uk or by contacting Katrina.