WSJ colleague Amir Efrati is reporting Google has purchased Wildfire Interactive for $250 million, citing a person with direct knowledge for the price.

From Efrati:

Google is the No. 1 seller of ads online, so Wildfire would fit into its suite of services for advertisers, Google said in a blog post on Tuesday. Wildfire, a four-year-old company with around 350 employees, also helps companies to promote themselves through non-paid accounts on Facebook, Twitter Inc. and Pinterest Inc., and other social media sites. Wildfire’s clients include Amazon.com Inc., Target Corp., Sony Corp., according to its website.

“With Wildfire, we’re looking forward to creating new opportunities for our clients to engage with people across all social services,” wrote Jason Miller, a Google product management director, in the post. He said that giving businesses a “social presence can complement all marketing campaigns—search, display, video, mobile, offline ads and more.”

Google follows similar deals by Oracle and Salesforce to scoop up the ecosystem that lives and operates around Facebook and other social-media sites.

Of course, this comes as social media companies themselves remain in the doghouse for investors.

Facebook, which itself has made moves some consider an early challenge to selling advertising across the web like Google, was hitting new lows Tuesday, down 6.3% to $21.69 recently. That’s 43% below its IPO price from mid-May.