Social media is a broad term that covers a lot of sites on the web these days. Its a term that has a lot of connotation attached to it, and recently, companies have been paying big money for anything that shows a hint of success in the world of social media. Need an example? Look no further than whizz kid and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg paying a cool BILLION to acquire Instagram. And now, Google is looking to get in the game by acquiring the social media monitoring software, Wildfire.

Wildfire is, at it’s heart, an advertising company. It’s main function is to help people and (more importantly) business, distribute content and manage success across all of the major social media networks. The company is roughly four years old and has experienced astronomical success, already servicing clientele like Virgin, Sony, and Amazon.

The product director for Google, Jason Miller, indicated that the purchase will be a boon for Google’s already massive bank of advertising customers

“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.”

Google is already the go-to-guy when it comes to SEO, and now they’re looking to become the number one player in the social media marketing game as well. This isn’t a huge surprise really, if you look at Google’s own trends, social media has been becoming more and more relevant with every update. So now, social media is the most important aspect of a good SEO strategy, and Google owns the top social media posting and monitoring service.

Well played.

What did the purchase do to the Google coffers? Well, compared to Facebook they got off pretty light. The flat purchase price was reported as $250 million, but now sources are reporting that it may be as high as $400 million when you take into account contractual bonuses.

According to Wildfire, the purchase will have no effect on its service or its customers.

Original story about Google buying Wildfire was posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Google Purchases Wildfire