SmallBusinessNewz

By now, you have no doubt heard that Google has released a new product called Google Buzz. It's part Gmail feature, part social network, and part information aggregator. I'm not going to get into a long explanation about what it is. You can read my version of that here.

I want to talk about a few reasons small businesses may find a tremendous amount of opportunities with Google Buzz. We don't know how popular the feature will be yet, so it's hard to say just how big of an impact it can potentially have on your marketing, but considering that studies show that mobile Internet user intent is in Google Buzz's favor, it's an option worth looking at.

According to a study by PR firm Ruder Finn, 91% of mobile phone users go online to socialize, compared with 79% of traditional desktop PC users. That means mobile has the power to play a big role in just how many people are going to be using Google Buzz. Buzz is available right from the Google homepage on iPhone and Android devices. Google says that is the most popular mobile home page in the world. That could go a long way.

With Google Buzz, you'll find another way to reach people in their email inboxes. That is if they use Gmail, and in December, Gmail had 176 million unique visitors according to comScore. That's not as many as some other popular web mail services, but it's nothing to shake a stick at.

Google will be integrating Buzz into many of its products as time goes on. It's not just about reaching Gmail users. It's about reaching Google users, and that is a far more significant number.

Buzz posts appear on Google user's Google profile pages, which get indexed by Google for web search. Google Buzz could play a direct role in both Google's real-time search and social search elements.  Google didn't really talk about social search with regards to Buzz, but it would not be surprising to see Buzz updates integrated these into social search, which recently became part of the web search norm. Your Gmail contacts are the first people listed in your "social circle" that Google draws from for these results.

If Buzz content appears in both real-time search results and social search results, that's two good-sized chunks of SERP real estate. Not all SERPs have both or either, but it opens some additional search marketing doors. Google Buzz also means another place to monitor your reputation.