Women, Boomers Dominate Social Media

Boomers — especially boomer women — book more travel online than any other group. Photo from Adventure Women

I’ve come across some statistics that should of interest to any travel marketers who wonder whether to reach out to women, boomers — and boomer women in particular.

In a previous post, I wrote about how boomer women spend the most money on travel.

Now, new findings show that if you’re basing a travel marketing campaign on social media, it pays to aim it toward women. 

With the exception of Linked In, where the majority of users are men, women dominate social media in the U.S., according to findings published at FinancesOnline.com (compiled from reports by the Pew Research Center and others).

Here are the stats: about three-quarters of adult women in the U.S. use Facebook, compared to two-thirds of the adult men.

For Pinterest, women outnumber men 33 percent to eight percent. 

For Instagram, the numbers are 20 percent women, 15 percent men.

For Twitter, it’s 18 percent women, 17 percent men.

Only at LinkedIn, where the amount of adult male usage is 24 percent compared to females at 19 percent, are men more highly represented.

Women are also more likely to use social media several times a day, outpacing men 30 percent to 26 percent.

And women are more likely to interact with brands on social media as well, according to the findings. Some 53 percent of adult women access offers on social media compared to 36 percent of men.

These numbers don’t include age breakdowns (beyond “adult”), but to get a sense of how many of these users are of boomer age, we turn to figures compiled by Creating Results Strategic Marketing.

For starters, about one third of all Internet users in the U.S. are boomers — closely approximating their percentage of the U.S. population.

Boomers use email just about as much as Millennials and GenXers (92 percent), use search engines almost as much (trailing Millennials only slightly), and buy products online in comparable percentages to Millennials and GenXers (74 percent).

Particularly apropos to this blog, more boomers book travel online than any other age group — just edging out GenXers (70 percent for younger boomers, 67 percent for older boomers, and 67 percent for GenXers) and easily outdistancing Millennials.

Now back to social media:

From January 2011 until January of this year, Facebook saw an 80 percent rise in users 55 and above, according to findings by iStrategy Labs.  And 20 percent of boomers use various social networks daily.

But here are the most telling stats, keeping in mind that boomers are about one-third of the U.S. population:

* 41 percent of Facebook users are boomers

* 48 percent of Twitter users are boomers

* 53 percent of Pinterest users are boomers

* and 62 percent of LinkedIn users are boomers.

Women, boomers, and particularly boomer women — marketers should ignore them at their peril.

Answer to This Week’s Travel Quiz:

According to the National Travel and Tourism Office, how much did international visitors to the U.S. spend in 2013 on travel-related expenses (including air travel on U.S. carriers)?

A. $180 billion

B. $150 billion

C. $210 billion

D. $120 billion

The answer is A., $180 billion