Google has gotten into the social media marketing business with the acquisition of Wildfire.

The company has been around for about four years, and has managed to grow to 400 employees and 16,000 customers. Its social media brand management services have been used by companies like Virgin, Cirque du Soleil, Gilt Group and Spotify.

If you’re not familiar with Wildfire, these videos should help:

“The ultimate goal is better and fresher content, and more meaningful interactions,” says Google’s Jason Miller. “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,” he adds. “We’ve been working towards this end for some time. For example, Google Analytics helps businesses measure the contribution of hundreds of social sites; our Admeld service has helped to serve ads in Facebook developers’ social apps; and our DoubleClick platform enables clients to run and measure ads across social websites. On Google+, brands use services like Vitrue, Buddy Media and others to manage their pages, with many more to come.”

Google intends to complement all of this with the Wildfire acquisition.

“We believe that over time the combination of Wildfire and Google can lead to a better platform for managing all digital media marketing,” Wildfire co-founders, Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard say in a joint blog post. “For now, we 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.”

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.