Originally published on SocialCommerceToday.com
Two years ago, a Facebook-centric marketing app for running social media promotions, Wildfire, launched Groupon-style group deals for Facebook, allowing retailers to offer group-discounts on Facebook when fans club together and buy together.
W hotels was one of the first users of group-buy promotions on Facebook.
Two years later, this week, Google snaps up Wildfire for a cool $350m (rivals Buddy Media went to Salesforce for $689m, and Vitrue and Involver to Oracle for $300m and undisclosed respectively).
Of course, like its rivals, Wildfire does a whole lot more than allow retailers to run promotions on Facebook and other top social media channels – it offers a full marketing suite for ad and page management for social channels, as well as monitoring and analytics services. Sources report that Wildfire will be folded into Google’s DoubleClick online advertising subsidiary.
As well as a backdoor into Facebook for Google, the Google-Wildfire combo could be good for social commerce – especially if promotions and ads in social media are Google checkout enabled.