Google has just announced its purchase of social media marketing software developer, Wildfire.
The acquisition will likely lead to Google providing advanced promotional services for businesses and brands that want to run marketing campaigns on Google+.
However, Wildfire has stated that it will continue to deliver marketing services across all social services including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more, even though these sites make up much of Google+’s competition.
This means that Google will now run a service that actually benefits from the success of its competitors. So as networks such as Facebook and Twitter gain popularity with brands, Google can cash in on that success. But as Google focuses more and more on the promoting Google+, will it decide to change up Wildfire’s offerings to mainly benefit its own social network?
Currently, Wildfire offers marketing tools that can help brands manage activity on multiple social networks, measure activities and results, build strategies, monetize social audiences, and more. One feature, however, that isn’t run by Wildfire is social media advertising.
Currently, Wildfire only sells ads through its partner, Adaptly. So if Google decides that it wants a full-service social media marketing suite, it would have to also purchase Adaptly or another social ads platform.
But for now, Adaptly and Wildfire will continue their partnership. So Wildfire users won’t necessarily see any immediate changes to the service because of this acquisition.
Wildfire was started in 2008 when its founders were looking to host a Facebook contest for their New Zealand based travel company. When they discovered that running the promotion on Facebook would require a separate application, they decided to create their own software, which became the first version of Wildfire.
Today, Wildfire continues to help different brands run similar promotions and a variety of different marketing efforts across Facebook and other platforms. And now that Wildfire has joined up with Google, Wildfire says it will continue to deliver those same services, while it builds and improves new tools for companies wanting to use social media to promote their businesses in new and different ways.
“Wildfire has stated that it will continue to deliver marketing services across all social services” – Wildfire dreaming a nice dream…
From the time when Wildfire has been founded in 2008 it has made pretty big advances in the world of marketing and I am not surprised hearing that Google has taken over it, I wonder how the social media world will change in overall, since Wildfire works along with the Google’s competitors?! Time will show!
To think that Google will be happy to make a tiny (relative term obviously) profit on Wildfire instead of owning the social networking space is naive. Google has two motives I see. First, they want to get a back door into Facebook’s demographic data so they can improve their targeting ability in AdWords. Or they just want to cripple/shut down a tool helping their competition and reap the entire benefit for themselves.
It was a smart move for Wildfire to go over to the Google side (may not have been optional lol). Only time will tell if they will be able to remain true to their company beliefs or if they will simply become something else Google owns.