Google acquires social media marketing startup Wildfire

Google picks up its shopping bag yet again. After email management software Sparrow, Meebo and QuickOffice, it has now acquired Wildfire, a social media marketing firm. In its official blog, Google revealed that the team of this four-year old startup will be joining Google. This move is to offer better and fresher content and more meaningful interactions on the social platform. Google knows well that businesses across the world are using social media to share information and also as a marketing and advertising platform. The blog says that social presence can be complemented with all marketing campaigns such as search, display, video, mobile, offline ads and more.

Google buys Wildfire

“People today can make their voices heard in ways that were previously impossible, and Wildfire helps businesses uphold their end of the conversation (or spark a new one). In a complex and changing landscape, businesses want to manage and measure these efforts in an integrated way. We’ve been working towards this end for some time. 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,” disclosed the Google blog.

WildFire was founded by Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard four years ago and the Wildfire team has built a service that helps businesses such as Virgin, Cirque du Soleil, Gilt Group and Spotify to manage their social efforts across numerous social websites. Basically, it is a platform where brands can manage their pages, apps, tweets, videos, sponsorships, ads, promotions and more. Some of the popular social websites these days are  Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Last month, Google acquired Sparrow, a provider of email management software for Apple's platforms. "Now we're joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision - one that we think we can better achieve with Google," said Dom Leca, chief executive officer of Sparrow, in an announcement posted on the company's website. No financial details of the acquisition were disclosed. Sparrow said its applications will continue to be available for the time being, but they do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps anytime soon, said the company in an email to its users.

Google also acquired Quickoffice for an undisclosed fee and the financial terms were not revealed as well. Commenting on the acquisition by Google, Quickoffice’s Co-founder and CEO, Alan Masarek said, “When we embarked on our mission to become the world leader in office productivity, we knew we were taking on a huge challenge. We worked very hard to build Quickoffice as a user friendly, seamless and yet powerful way to view, edit, sync and share documents anywhere, anytime. It’s been a very humbling experience to see this vision embraced by our users”.