When it comes to purchasing real estate, you often hear the cliché, “Location, Location, Location.” In the world of virtual real estate, Facebook may be an untapped resource for you to connect with potential candidates and clients alike.  Facebook gets a high amount of traffic. According to Compete.com, Facebook had over 129 million unique visitors last month. To put it in perspective, LinkedIn had approximately 15 million unique visitors during that time.

Facebook has people search capabilities. Log into your Facebook account, scroll all the way down and you will notice a “Find Friends” link in the bottom right hand corner. Click on this link and scroll down again. You can search for former college classmates or co-workers. The beauty of this search capability is that you can search even if you didn’t attend or work that those entities. You can target specific colleges and companies that would be on the resumes of your ideal candidates.

You can create a Facebook fan page to engage and build credibility with your candidates. Fill your page with information that your candidates want to know more about, not just a place to post your hard-to-fill open positions. The best recruiting fan pages on Facebook have videos, promote upcoming events and have lots of wall posts, like the U.S. Army Recruiting fan page at http://www.facebook.com/goarmy. If you do create a page, it is vital that one person is available to respond to your community with comments or suggestions. Promote your Facebook fan page in all of your communication: email signature, website, other social media networks, newsletters, etc.

In conclusion, use your professional, not your personal profile when representing your company in Facebook or any social network. Start with a targeted plan and then tap the talent pools that exist and visit Facebook regularly.

Jenny DeVaughn of Social Precision specializes in strategic corporate and professional growth via social media consulting.  Her scope of experience is focused on creating customized social media webinars, presentations and social recruiting training.  Jenny’s clients include: small companies to large corporations who are seeking to leverage free social media tools to increase revenue, discover new clients, gain a competitive advantage, demonstrate value, engage talent, genuinely connect with target prospects and monitor their brand online. Jenny has over 17,000 first level connections on LinkedIn. You can follow Jenny via Twitter at http://twitter.com/jennydevaughn or connect with her on Facebook at http://facebook.com/socialprecision.com.