Today, 42% of adults in the U.S. with Internet access maintain a profile on a social networking site, up from 20% in 2007, according to Forrester Research. And in an economy where almost one-tenth of the population is unemployed, more job-seekers are likely to look for opportunities online.

Meanwhile existing members of social networks may take the time to fill in more of their job history in their profiles.

Recruiters have been scouring professionally-oriented social network LinkedIn for qualified candidates for years now. More than 40% of Fortune 100 companies pay to use the site to find talent among its 46 million members.

But social networks are still evolving as places to hire and be hired, and Facebook, with its 250 million members, is gaining ground.

Unlike its more career-focused competitor, Facebook offers members profiles that tend to reflect their whole life. In the past that deterred many who were concerned an incriminating photo or wall post might be discovered by a potential new boss.

Professional and personal lines blurring

That fear is going away as people become more comfortable sharing their lives online, sometimes even blending their personal and professional personas. Some users take advantage of Facebook’s privacy settings to edit the information they present to professional contacts.

More importantly, Facebook is gaining credibility as a tool for recruiters and human resources professionals, the very folks who’ve been avid fans of LinkedIn. For one thing, Facebook seems to cast a wider net and provide recruiters with more references – and more outlets to spread the news about a job opening. Facebook users have an average of 120 friends. While LinkedIn won’t release this statistic for its members, recruiters say the average number of connections likely is smaller because of the site’s narrower scope.

The types of relationships and contacts found in a personal network versus a professional one are also assumed to be more authentic and less transactional, and therefore more desirable to marketers. And while Facebook members now span all ages and demographics, the average age of its users is 31, compared to 41-years-old for LinkedIn.

These are aspects that attracted technology company EMC (EMC) to Facebook. “Many college grads aren’t on LinkedIn,” says Polly Pearson, VP of employment brand and strategy engagement at EMC. “We’re going where target market is—that’s why we’re on Facebook.”

Reaching recent college grads

As a business-to-business lacking strong consumer awareness, EMC relies on its Facebook page to build its reputation as a great place to work. It’s still too early to judge the success of EMC’s foray into social networking—the page only has 745 fans—but Pearson says the company has made hires through social networks and is more focused on starting a dialogue with potential employees.

“We have to have a huge pipeline,” explains Pearson. “A company can have a website all day long but there’s a lot more people hanging out on Facebook than on our website.”

As a technology company, EMC took a DIY approach to Facebook. But companies like the Pepsi Bottling Group (PBG), Harley Davidson (HOG) and Bally Fitness rely on CareerBuilder to develop a presence on social networks. The career site consults with 250 clients, helping them build Facebook community pages that incorporate job listings, blogs about applying for positions and discussions among candidates and employees.

“Companies are always initially afraid,” says CareerBuilder chief marketing officer Richard Castellini. “We’re trying to help them understand that by giving up control you’re still going to get benefits in terms of deeper and wider conversations.”

While active job seekers might visit the Facebook pages of companies they’re interested in, Facebook also enables companies to reach target candidates who might not be looking. This more recent advance is made possible by Facebook Connect, a feature that enables websites and applications to access information in a user’s profile (with their permission).

Two Silicon Valley start-ups are deploying the feature to help companies encourage their employees to refer friends for open positions. Internal referral candidates are the most appealing to human resources departments since they are less expensive to find and tend to be the best fit for a position, meaning less turnover.

San Francisco-based Jobvite manages the entire hiring process for its customers, which include Tivo (TIVO), Mattson (MTSN) and Mozilla. The firm, which announced an additional $8.25 million in funding yesterday from ATA Ventures and CMEA Capital on top of an initial $7.2 million investment from CMEA in 2007, operates a “software as a service,” or SAAS, platform. Clients simply subscribe the service on a monthly basis, rather than paying to have the software installed on their own servers.

The name Jobvite originally referred to a feature that enabled clients’ employees to use Outlook to generate invitations to apply for jobs at their company. But that required employees to sift through their contacts themselves, assuming they even used Outlook as their source for email addresses.

In February the company created an application that used Facebook Connect to allow employees to send job invitations via Facebook. The app will even search the profiles of the employee’s Facebook friends to see who might make a good match for the job. The invite can then also be forwarded on to friends outside the original employee’s network. (The invite feature is also available for LinkedIn.)

“We help companies scale how they hire people through networks,” says Jobvite CEO Dan Finnigan, who spent five years at Yahoo’s (YHOO) HotJobs unit prior to joining the start-up last year.

Appirio in San Mateo offers a similar invite feature as software-as-a-service, but only for customers of Salesforce.com (CRM). The firm, which is backed by Salesforce, Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital, offers applications that manage referrals in social networks, whether for hiring purposes or a marketing campaign. All the data is sent back to Salesforce for analysis and tracking.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a job right now, especially one you love, all of this may not seem especially relevant to you. But at some point in your career, you could simply be posting a status update when your next job comes looking for you.

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If not, why not?

I would like to think that everyone already has some familiarity with Facebook. Nevertheless, for the three of four readers who have not yet encountered Facebook, it is a social networking site that enjoys more monthly visitors than any of its competitors. In essence, Facebook allows its users to create an on-line network of friends and colleagues who then have access to the content posted by everyone in their own network. As a medium for communication, I think it is the best communication tool available on the Internet and in many ways is more efficient than even having access to all of your contacts in one room.

But back to my initial question: if you are not on Facebook yet, why not? You are missing out on something big.

If you are on Facebook, are you maximizing your use of it as a tool to help you with your personal finances? Have you even thought of the ways that Facebook can help you to add to your net worth in ways big and small, or is Facebook nothing more than a gathering place for the classmates, colleagues and cougars you know? If you do not see the financial benefits of Facebook yet, you will over the coming year as Facebook increasingly will dominant the marketing focus of a great many companies, or so I believe. Here is where I see Facebook headed and, in some cases, where it has already been.

Marketing Promotions: Last month, Starbucks ran a Facebook-only promotion in which it gave away coupons for 800,000 pints of Starbucks ice cream. With 250 million or more active global users, Facebook offers marketing penetration that no other consumer site is likely to match and businesses are quickly realizing that. Over the course of the next year, look for a substantial increase in the number of on-line coupon promotions and giveaways that are limited to Facebook users. You will need to “become a fan” of the brands and products that you like to use in order to ensure that you are likely to receive word of such promotions but once you do, the opportunities should be many.

Facebook Only Discounts: A lot of businesses are capturing traffic for their brick and mortar stores by posting discount advertisements that are available only to Facebook users. A local pizzeria has been offering a series of BOGO deals that can only be obtained by telling the server that they want the Facebook promotion.

Employment Opportunities: A few days ago, Maggiano’s restaurant posted on Facebook that it is hiring a marketing intern for its Dallas office. With a potential audience of up to a quarter of a million users, Facebook offers tremendous potential as a recruiting tool so that businesses can reach out to users who already have an interest in the business or a specific industry.

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The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were aimed specifically at the users’ personal pages on the sites. Some commentary suggests the attacks came from Russian nationalists who have control over vast botnets, whereas Cyxymu claims it came from the Russian government itself as a means to silence its critics.

“Launching DDoS attacks against services like Facebook is the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” F-Secure researcher Mikko Hyponnen said. “The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal, and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.”

Facebook said on Friday that its service has returned to normal for its 250 million users. “Yesterday’s attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves,” the company said in a release. “Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users.”

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Your aim should be turning customers, who may stop by any convenient spot for a morning coffee, into fans who will drive past other bakeries to wait in line for your offerings, says Chris Warner, vice-president of marketing for JackBe, a small software firm based in Chevy Chase, Md. that specializes in social media marketing.

To get that kind of loyalty, of course, you’ll have to deliver a superior product with terrific customer service. Social networking can’t make bad coffee palatable or make your yogurt creamier, but it can spread the word quickly as you build a reputation for excellence.

Web 2.0 technologies can help you make a virtual community that keeps your business top of mind for your fans and lets your fans help you engage new prospective customers

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Examiner’s Cheryl Phillips — It’s not likely to be a smackdown that is worth watching. However, The Wall Street Journal’s alleged attempt to compete with LinkedIn as a professional social network is a little bit like asking me to become a contestant on The American Gladiators.

LinkedIn has more than 15 million visitors each month. WSJ’s current online community gets barely one third of that and there isn’t really a heck of a lot going on the site. The word is that WSJ will close that site when they create their monster social network that is going to make LinkedIn shake it its social boots. Not likely…

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