Brands Back Equality To Lure LGBT Dollars Over The Rainbow

America's best-known brands and other businesses must believe big bucks lay somewhere over the rainbow, because they're filling social media with enough pro-marriage equality images and messages to become ubiquitous.

The U.S. wedding industry is already worth $55 billion, comprising over 500,000 business and employing nearly 800,000 workers, according to the analyst firm IBISworld, as reported by USA Today. Now, add to that mix a new customer base, consisting of a share of the nine million lesbian gay, bisexual and transgender Americans -- according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law -- and marketers start seeing dancing dollar signs.

The corporate celebration of Friday's Supreme Court's decision on same-sex marriage shows how far the nation has come in a short time, reported The Wall Street Journal.

A WSJ/NBC survey in March found that 59 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage; that number was 30 percent in 2004.

The newspaper says 379 corporations, including Apple Inc., Hilton Hotels and Walt Disney Co. filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of legalizing same-sex marriage.

As news spread Friday of the Supreme Court's decision, many of the companies that were part of the brief blasted its support via social media. In the 24 hours following the ruling, there were 3.4 million tweets with the hashtag #LoveWins posted, according to data from social analytics firm Topsy.

So far, there have been 6.2 million tweets related to the marriage equality ruling in the past week. At its peak, 11:56 a.m. EDT on Friday, there were 35,000 tweets sent per minute. Three hours later, the conversation was continuing, at about 20,000 tweets per minute. And it's still trending; at press time the stats showed almost 70,000 #lovewins tweets an hour.

And tech companies used both their own platforms and social media to celebrate the decision. Googling "gay marriage" generated an image of people holding hands at the top of the search results.

Apple's Tim Cook, the out CEO who is the most prominent gay leader in the business world, tweeted a quote from the late Steve Jobs: "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

Even Uber displayed rainbows behind its cars.

Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg posted on his wall: "Our country was founded on the promise that all people are created equal, and today we took another step towards achieving that promise." The social media company also unveiled a new feature that lets users put a rainbow filter over their profile photo.

Here's a link to help you add a rainbow to your Facebook profile picture: