As a recruiter, how can you reach a potentially large pool of candidates in the social media space in a short period of time? The answer lies in a carefully crafted social media strategy.

Link your social media accounts

As a recruiter, carefully build your professional profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. A strong presence on these 3 social media forums is an absolute must if you want to taste success in social media recruiting. Linking your networks is even more important, as it allows you to maintain consistency across social networks.

It may seem a bit daunting at first, but maintaining all 3 networks can be automated in such a way that if you do a Twitter update, it will automatically update your statuses on LinkedIn and Facebook, saving you valuable time and energy. Both LinkedIn and Facebook offer Twitter widgets and all you need to do is activate the widgets to link all 3 accounts. Once you link your Twitter account with LinkedIn and Facebook, you’re ready to go to the next level.

Create your blog site for job postings to take advantage of RSS feeds

Do I need a blog? The answer is no if you have an applicant tracking system that generates RSS feeds for your jobs and offers a job posting platform. If you don’t have a system to rely on, a blog can become an indispensable tool in your hiring process. Blogs can be used as a remarkably cheap platform to advertise your jobs, and hundreds of savvy recruiters are doing it.

So go ahead and create your blog. Create your blog profile carefully with links to your LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Make sure the bands are even on all 4 decks. The best approach here is to keep things simple and professional to begin with. You can always add bells and whistles as you gain confidence. And yes, there are out-of-the-box widgets to integrate your social media profiles with your blog and they can be discovered with a bit of research.

All popular blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, etc. to name a few) generate RSS feeds. Innocuous RSS feeds are the most effective form of content syndication on the Internet today and offer unlimited possibilities to spread your content on the Internet. We need to take advantage of RSS feeds to reach a larger audience. Once you build your blog and start posting, your blog site will generate your RSS feed. There are many ways to advertise your feed:

You can submit your feeds to all major search engines; you can integrate them into Font Directories. And you can integrate your RSS feed into your social network, which is what I’ll focus on in this article.

Use FeedBurner to automatically post your blog’s RSS feeds as Tweets

Create a FeedBurner account ( http://www.feedburner.com ) and save your feed to make your blog’s RSS reader easy to read. After recording your feed, use FeedBurner’s tools to optimize and advertise your feed. To advertise your feed, FeedBurner offers a gem of a feature called socialize that integrates your RSS feed with your Twitter account. The interface is simple and intuitive and can be activated with just a few clicks! The system allows you to send your blog feeds to your Twitter account at 1 hour intervals in a Twitter compatible format.

You have now created a system where, the moment you post your work on your blog, the post will be automatically included in your Twitter account as Tweets via FeedBurner. Once your feed is published on Twitter, your already linked LinkedIn and Facebook accounts will automatically pick up the tweets and post them as your status updates. In other words, all of your connections on the top 3 social networks can see your job postings as status updates with a link to click. This, in turn, will take them to your blog to view your work and apply. You are now ready to move on to Level 4.

Go beyond your network using Twitter

Now you have created a system to post your work to your contacts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Is there a way to go beyond your network? Social networks tend to grow organically based on how aggressively you build them and your works can quickly spread via viral mode to a larger network of second and third degree contacts. You can reach an audience beyond your network with the help of some Twitter tools.

• Create an account with twitjobsearch.com and integrate your twitter feed. Your work tweets will become part of a great Twitter work platform and reach thousands of followers beyond your network.

• Also use twitterjobcast.com all you need to do is use the word hiring in your job titles. Twitter Job Cast will automatically collect your posts and post them on twitterjobcast.com. As a strategy, start your job posts with the word hiring and use position and placement in a well-constructed blog title. Example “Hiring Mortgage Sales Agents in San Francisco, CA”.

Closing the loop

You are now reaching beyond your networks and effectively closed the communication loop for effective social media recruiting.

This article, at best, lays out a very basic foundation of what can be achieved in social media recruiting. There are hundreds of Twitter tools and the possibilities are limitless. You can check out feedmyapp.com to experiment with social media tools and advance your social media recruiting strategy.