Google is pushing its huge advertising business empire. The company has just announced that it is set to take over a social media marketing entity, for an undisclosed amount. Founded about four years ago, Wildfire works in the domain of helping brands manage their ambitious social campaigns across networks like Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. It has, for record, roughly 16,000 customers. They include Spotify, Amazon, Unilever and Virgin.
The addition of Wildfire is likely to bolster Google Plus, Google’s own social network, apart from providing insights about rival platforms like Facebook. The product management director for the company, Jason Miller, was quoted as saying in the company’s official post that with Wildfire, they are looking to create newer opportunities for their clients for successfully engaging with people across different social services. The company believes that more seamless solutions and better content will help unlock the Web’s potential for people and businesses.
The latest deal in the form of Wildfire comes even as many brands world over grapple to build, monitor and manage their unique footprints on social sites. Start-ups such as Wildfire assist corporations by helping them engage their existing and prospective consumers. The process revolves around tracking their marketing campaigns’ effectiveness. According to a post on Wildfire’s site, it will continue to partner with other online networks and ‘function as usual’, in spite of its new ownership. Expressing their resolve to continue building tools, which help enhance the manner in which consumers and brands experience social networks, Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard, the two Wildfire founders, explained,
“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. We believe that over time the combination can lead to a better platform for managing all digital media marketing. For now, we remain focused on helping brands run and measure their social engagement and ad campaigns across the entire web and across all social services – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more – and to deliver rich and satisfying experiences for their consumers.”
Wildfire’s roots can be traced to a technology the duo developed in 2008 as co-owners of a adventure travel company based in New Zealand. When they wished to give away a trip to fans for free, they realized that they would need them to create an app for running the promotion across Facebook. So the two got to work creating new software, and Wildfire was conceptualized. The aim was to make social media marketing more effective and easier.
In a span of four years, it was expanded to monitor social media marketing for thousands of businesses and top global brands. Chosen as the two-time winner of fbFund courtesy Facebook, it now provides a holistic Social Marketing Suite. It became in early 2012 among the few social media marketing entities to have a complete software platform, which integrates directly with YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Wildfire Social Marketing Suite 2.0 has powerful, user-friendly features like social ad optimization, extended multi-network support, and complete enterprise management and Control.
