Google on Tuesday announced it has bought Wildfire, a social-media management platform company.
It is rumoured that the search engine company paid US$250 million to acquire Wildfire, which was funded in the early stages as a startup in part by Facebook, a Google Plus competitor.
Wildfire describes itself as an “”easy-to-use yet powerful tool to grow, engage, and monetize your audience on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.”
The company was started approximately four years ago by Alain Chuard and Victoria Ransom and helps their customers like Amazon, Spotify and Virgin to manage their Ads, content and promotions accross social networking platforms.
In a statement, Wildfire stated: “Wildfire is joining Google! We truly could not think of a more perfect home for Wildfire. It makes us so happy to know that joining with Google will make it easier for us to realize our vision of changing the way the world markets and enable us to live up to our commitment to make Wildfire an incredible place for our team and our customers.”
In the 4-year period, the company has grown from a 5-person company to employing almost 200 people. It has also been pioneered defining and shaping a new industry, namely social media marketing.
Commenting on the acquisition, Jason Miller, Product Management Director at Google, said that in a complex and changing landscape, businesses want to manage and measure these efforts in an integrated way and the company has been working towards this end, for some time.
According to Miller, Google Analytics helps businesses measure the contribution of hundreds of social sites and the company’s Admeld service has helped to serve ads in Facebook developers’ social apps.
He added that Google’s DoubleClick platform enables clients to run and measure ads across social websites.
On Google+, brands use services like Vitrue, Buddy Media and others to manage their pages, with many more to come, he said.
“With Wildfire, we’re looking forward to creating new opportunities for our clients to engage with people across all social services. We believe that better content and more seamless solutions will help unlock the full potential of the web for people and businesses,” concluded Miller.
