When it comes to holiday shopping, eWeek.com reports that social sites like Facebook and Twitter are giving competition, or at least providing some impact, to search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing.

While direct competition between search engines and social media sites is still a long way off, some shoppers in November 2009 did utilize social sites to find those holiday shopping deals.

The eWeek.com article cites a recent ComScore shopper survey indicating that 28% percent of those surveyed who had started their holiday shopping said that social media influenced their purchases. Some examples include searching for promotions or deals on Facebook fan pages or being influenced by a friend's status update about a recent purchase.
Similiarly, respondents indicated that they looked for the same kind of promotions by following retailers on Twitter and were also influenced by their Twitter friends’ "tweets" about product purchases.

Whether those shoppers influenced by these social sites went directly to the e-commerce sites to make a purchase or searched for those sites via Google, Yahoo or Bing is unclear. However, comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni states:

"Social media really appears to be emerging as an important marketing channel this holiday season. On the one hand, its emergence is being driven by increased consumer adoption of these technologies and the exponential growth in digital word-of-mouth that is occurring over this medium. On the other hand, having a social media marketing strategy makes sense for retailers in this environment because it's cost-effective and shows an effort to get closer to one's customers."

While overall shopper spending is down this holiday season compared to spending last season, comScore has reported that e-commerce spending has seen a three percent increase this year over the same time last year. Further, the influence positive word of mouth has on consumer purchasing habits continues to grow thanks to the ease of which these messages spread through social sites. This trend reinforces the importance for e-tailers to continue investing in social marketing strategies as well as SEO strategies for findability via leading search engines.