A year is a long time in social media. Way back in February 2009, at B2B Marketing’s first social media event, the audience were asked whether they used Twitter or not: only a tiny minority raised their hands.

Fast forward ten months to December’s B2B event organised by Dell, and the proportions were reversed: it was only the minority who didn’t actively use Twitter.

Amazing that inside 12 months this niche microblogging platform has become a mainstream B2B marketing platform. For anyone out there who is still has their head in the sand, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Of course, as a media organisation, the migration to digital arguably affects us more profoundly than most, so its worth briefly examining how our own social media experiments have faired since autumn 2008 when we first started taking them seriously.

The primary change is that we’re no-longer regarding them as experiments: they are now primary delivery channels. We now have 2500 members of our LinkedIn group, many of whom are based outside the UK; 13,500 followers on Twitter, a growing presence on Facebook, whilst our Youtube site has been revelatory in helping us source and utilise video content. I genuinely can’t imagine how we managed without it.

On the more negative side, Xing, Viadeo and Flickr all fundamentally failed to work for us; for perhaps obvious reasons on all counts.

Bearing in mind how much everything has changed in the last 12 months, the situation at the end of 2010 is probably anyone’s guess. But for what it’s worth, here’s mine. The trend of 2010 will be consolidation, with the brands at the head of the curve honing in on specific platforms and communities and reinforcing their presences on them, and cashing in on the developing functionality and growing reach. The social media ‘landgrab’ of 2009 is over: it’s time for brands to build on what they have.

Whilst we’re unlikely to see another Twitter emerge and profoundly change the landscape, this is no reason to relax. The pace of the migration will be the same, only it will be more focused. Those brands that have not yet embraced the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn must take a long hard look at themselves as these platforms will be the key battlegrounds of 2010.