18 Trillion Reasons Why Women and Social Media Matter
Sep 22nd, 2009 by David Svet
Quite a few of our clients are pretty conservative. For those of you who don’t know, Spur Communications provides strategic marketing communications for the financial services and philanthropic sectors. I love working in these sectors, but I’ve got to admit, this is not a wild bunch. It seems to take these groups a bit longer to acknowledge and react to changes in society. However, I am not here to lay blame, but to merely point out an opportunity — women and social media.
There are 109 million adult women in the United States between the ages of 18-77. That’s roughly 1/3 of the nation’s population. However, they control far more than 1/3 of consumer spending. Of the $9.96 trillion (that’s with a T) of U.S. consumer spending, women control $4.3 trillion. As a point of comparison, China’s current GDP is $4.4 trillion. Worldwide, women control $20 trillion in annual consumer spending. That number is expected to balloon to $28 trillion by 2014 when women’s earnings are expected to reach $18 trillion. In Kansas, we call that serious money. To the financial services and philanthropic sectors, this is a serious market that deserves products and services tailored for its unique needs — something that is largely overlooked at present.
This begs the question, how do you find 109 million women with $4.3 trillion to spend and figure out what they want? To start, 79 million of them use the Internet. 42 million women use social media and that number is climbing. Social media is great for asking questions and listening. Perhaps this is the place to start. What have you got to lose, other than access to an $18 trillion market?
