LOS ANGELES, Nov. 13, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- With the holiday season around the corner, Veooz.com presents a detailed analysis of social media conversations related to the holiday season. Veooz collects large volume of social media conversations as part of it's free tool for social media search and sentiment analysis. Veooz has analyzed a large volume of conversations on various social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, News and Blog comments which are in the context of holiday shopping and came up with some interesting insights on what to expect from consumers this shopping season.

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After a long downward trend in the economy the Veooz sentiment on "holiday spending" has been 80% positive. This indicates a positive consumer sentiment that could help give a boost to the US economy. While there is a lot of excitement on various economic indicators moving in the positive direction, people are taking it with a bit of skepticism.

This post found through Veooz posted on social media, pretty much summarizes the enthusiasm along with a sense of caution. Gene says, "Consumer purchases make up 70% of our GDP and with consumer sentiment high, that could lead to a short term growth. But bad news can quickly change consumer sentiment and lower expectations. Part of the reason that consumers became more positive was the drop below 8% unemployment and an apparent uptick in the housing market.".

With consumer sentiment at 5-year high, businesses are stocking up inventories to get ready for the holiday season. But what should businesses expect from consumers this season? Veooz provides some insights in this direction by analyzing the comments on social media.

"We have analyzed the context of all the posts related to holiday spending, christmas gifts and other related terms and came up with the top gifting ideas people are coming up with, top places where they want to buy and the top electronic brands they are talking about using our powerful natural language processing technology", says Prasad Pingali, CEO of SETU and makers of Veooz. We ranked all the items based on the number of posts each of them has occurred. While such an analysis can provide very useful insights, it is to be seen whether social media conversations are any indication of consumer demand for the holiday shopping season.

This season, relatively more number of people expressed to spend Christmas at home rather than travel to tourist destinations. Among the people who expressed interest in travelling, London was the most popular travel destination, followed by Las Vegas, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago in that order.

Gifting and Shopping ideas

The analysis shows that most popular preference for purchasing is online, followed by malls and stores. We ranked all the stores based on the number of mentions in the holiday related conversations. Amazon tops the list as a holiday shopping destination followed by Costco, Walmart, Target and eBay respectively.

Apart from a lot of mentions of greeting cards, the top ranking gift ideas were in this order: Music, Books, Films, Digital Games, Tickets, Clothes, Toys, Tablets, Mobile phones, Fashion accessories (such as Jewelry, Perfumes, Shoes, Scarves, Bags, Watches etc.), Gift Vouchers, Cameras, Computers, Laptops. This clearly indicates the consumers' order of preference is Entertainment followed by Fashion and Gadgets.

Video games seem to be a popular gifting idea after Music and Movies. The most popular gaming platforms being Microsoft XBox followed by Nintendo WII and Sony Playstation respectively.

So, whom are people gifting to?

We identified all the social relationships that are being mentioned in the conversations and ranked them to give an indication as to whom are people planning to buy the gifts for. The most popular relation being mentioned is wife, followed by husband, kids, friends, mom, dad, girlfriend, boyfriend, sister and brother respectively.

Top gadget brands

Though not the leading gifting idea, electronic gadgets form a popular gifting idea and are part of many people's wish list. Apple's iPad is ranked as the most popular holiday gift gadget. This is followed by XBox, iPhone, Wii, Android Tablet, Samsung Galaxy Note, Amazon Kindle, Macbook, Windows Phone (Nokia Lumia), Samsung Galaxy phone, PS3, iPod and Nexus respectively. This list indicates that tablets and bigger form factor devices such as Samsung Galaxy Note are slowly becoming more popular than smart phones.

Veooz.com is a free social media search, monitoring and sentiment analysis tool developed by SETU Software Systems P. Ltd.

Media Contact: Prasad Pingali SETU Software Systems P. Ltd., +91-9885227706, prasad@setusoftware.com

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SOURCE SETU Software Systems P. Ltd.