With five days left until Christmas, it’s time to take a look at some holiday shopping trends for 2011 as it pertains to how people are using the Internet on both desktops and mobile devices to shop.

• 28% of Holiday shoppers will use social media to find a gift idea and 67% of people planned to look around for a gift idea. This means that one of the best strategies you can employ is around SEO and Social Media. By ranking higher in search results or as people look for a gift or being in their news feeds as an item or an ad, the likelihood of being found increases over your competitors. This increases your brand awareness as a shopper is trying to make decision.
• 70% of people are not tied to a particular retailer for a gift so they will gravitate to uniqueness or a special. This is great news for a start up company or small business because using SEO, PPC, and Social Media allows you to play up aganist the big boys and try and get their customers. However, most of the big brands know this and will spend obscene amounts of money on ads to get those consumers. A lot will go into TV ads, but there is increasing ad buys for PPC and Social Media.
• 58% will use their mobile device while shopping. This means that your website must have a mobile version or you are simply losing out on a potential customer.
• 47% of people use their smartphones to price compare and 42% will search for a store based on their current location. This means you need to have your store’s website in all of the local directories like Bing, Google Maps, Foursquare, Patch, etc. If you don’t you miss out on a walk in customer.
• If someone owns a tablet computer like an iPad, a little less than half of those people will buy something online. Once again, you need to make sure your website has a version for a tablet computer and/or an app. Otherwise, you risk losing that person to someone like an Amazon.

All of the above stats were provided by Google Insights and their study on 2011 Holiday Consumer Intentions.