BlogHer—“the online community for women”—surveyed women on their use of online, social media, and it makes clear that if you are a business owner trying to reach female customers, you better have an online marketing strategy.  Or as Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends puts it, the BlogHer report “may cause you to re-think your entire marketing outreach.”   

The report estimates that 79 million American women are online, and 42 million of them participate in social media activity at least weekly—“social media” being defined as Blogs, message boards/forums, status updates (Twitter) and social networks like Facebook and MySpace.  The breakdown among those four areas looks like this:

Even more instructive is this diagram of the influence and reach of different social media activity:

You can read the report here.

And read Anita Campbell’s reaction at Small Business Trends here.