On Tuesday, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired Wildfire, to help boost Google’s social media marketing presence.
Based out of Redwood City, California, Wildfire Interactive Inc. has only been around for four short years. Wildfire’s list of in-depth social services and client portfolio can only make you wonder how Google will utilize this for its growing social network Google+? And how will it affect its rival social network, Facebook?
On Google’s official blog, Google wrote that it was looking forward to this acquisition of a “platform for brands to manage their pages, apps, tweets, videos, sponsorships, ads, promotions and more, all in one place.” The Wildfire platform allows brands to utilize a more integrated platform for “seamless” management of their social accounts.
With Wildfire’s extensive list of 16,000 customers including 30 of the top 50 brands, marketers may question what this means for Facebook. Wildfire states in a recent blog post that they “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. To this end, Wildfire will operate as usual, and there will be no changes to our service and support for our customers.”
With Google’s new acquisition of Wildfire, it seems there will be a shift in their relationship with Facebook as well. While Facebook may have been considered a top competitor for Google in the past, this will likely shift as Google now stands to see monetary gain with the growth of Facebook’s traffic.
As for Google’s social network, Google+, there haven’t been any announced plans yet. But we can only suspect that Google has a plan to integrate the two and it’s just a matter of time before we see a big game changer in social networks. It seems as though the big G took this round. It will be interesting to see how Facebook reacts. Stay tuned for more on this evolving news story!
+Anna Lea Crowe Social Media Strategist at Webhead Interactive.
