If you are focused just on one or two social media channels, such as Facebook or Twitter, you need to rethink your approach.

Ever since the demise of platforms such as Friendster and then MySpace, the social media landscape is littered with the corpses of once-great leaders. More recently, the popular blogging platform Posterous announced it was closing its doors.

The moral of this story is that brands run a risk by focusing only on Facebook and Twitter. Most of my clients come to me with just a Facebook profile. Some might have a Twitter account. Few of them have a presence on other social channels. This singular focus is a big mistake!

While Facebook and Twitter are undoubtedly the leaders of the pack, equally undoubted is the fact that other platforms are emerging to establish their market share, and trends among audiences are shifting like desert sands. It is perfectly possible for Twitter or Facebook to go the same way as Friendster, as a recent MIT analysis concludes: “It’s far from unlikely that Facebook itself will one day be a victim of a similar set of circumstances.” (An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network)

According to a new Piper Jaffrey study, popularity among teens of the leading social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and even YouTube (gasp!), has declined from two years ago (reported in the UK’s Daily Mail: The social networking teen turn-off: MORE evidence chat apps are set to take over from Facebook and Twitter).

Compared to a year ago, ten percent fewer teens named Facebook as their ‘most important’ site. Teens are ditching legacy sites in favor of lesser-known chat platforms such as Kik, Snapchat and Vine.

What does this mean for social marketers? The bottom line is that embracing only the 800 pound Facebook gorilla will hurt. It’s important therefore to spread your eggs among several social media baskets. 

For instance, Pinterest is the only big social platform showing growth among teens, so it makes sense to include it in your strategy, especially if teens are an important demographic. The challenge is to spread your efforts (risk) without diluting your presence in any of your platforms. Inevitably, this means higher costs as more investment is needed to maintain an effective presence in multiple platforms.

More importantly than jumping on the latest bandwagon is to monitor technology trends and to strategize around those trends. Also, your digital strategy needs to consider if trends among teens will translate to other demographics. And how does your strategy include engagement on chat platforms (if that is even tenable)?

A comprehensive strategy that incorporates multiple social platforms really is the only way to ensure the competition doesn’t crush your precious social media eggs.

Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and CEO of Rakuten, the largest e-commerce site in Japan and among the world’s largest by sales, poses an interesting question on LinkedIn: Does social media pose a threat to e-commerce?

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Geolocation services may not make money this year according to a Forrester report. That does not mean they’re dead in the water. Adoption rate is key. The question is will the advantages of geolocation outweigh security concerns. My guess is no. A few instances of stalkers following people to rob their empty homes for example, won’t deter millions from sharing their whereabouts with their social networks. As for Foursquare versus Facebook Places, I think Foursquare may rise to the occasion. Twitter didn’t disappear when FB introduced status update feeds. With FB places you have to navigate to it inside the FB app, whereas Foursquare is a dedicated app. And FB Places doesn’t have as good or established a reward system as Foursquare. FB is not going to rule the world just yet!

Facebook just announced a new tool for its social application Facebook Connect. According to their announcement, Translations for Facebook Connect is a “free tool for developers worldwide to simplify the process of translating a website… into any of the languages Facebook currently supports.”

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A recent AdAge article reports that the online ad firm uSocial is offering to boost the number of a company’s Facebook friends for 7.6 cents per friend ($654.30), or its Facebook “fans” for a mere 8.5 cents a fan.

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