The 2011 Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey released today showed that 55.3% of companies now use Facebook for recruiting, up just 0.7% since 2010. This indicates that the recent proliferation of social recruiting tools has not changed perceptions of the purpose of Facebook or led to a significant increase in recruiting there — or, at least not yet. 86.6% of businesses now say they recruit on LinkedIn, up 8.3 points, while 46.6% use Twitter, up only 1.8% since 2010.

The June survey of over 800 US-based human resources and recruitment professionals suggests that interest in recruitment on general interest social networks has been lagging the growth of the networks themselves. It’s not exactly clear how these professionals were chosen though, so there could be some bias.

The data contradicts the swell in social recruiting products that were launched or enhanced this year. Professional networking Facebook app BranchOut began to gain traction, spiking to 250,000 daily active users. The app will launch a premium enterprise recruiting solution on August 1st. Job referral networking app Pursuit launched, and its founder were promptly hired away by Facebook. Identified has begun work acquiring users to build a recruiter searchable database, and Monster.com launched a professional networking app where recruiters can post job openings.

Jobvite itself has continued refining its social distribution system for job listings. It also offers a tab app that companies can host on their Pages to solicit applications, similar to the Work For Us app from Work4 Labs.

Despite all these options, interest in recruiting on Facebook has been unable to surpass 59% that Jobvite’s survey showed in 2009. That peak came after a massive 23% jump up from 36% in 2008, which may have been caused by Facebook’s own massive growth that year leading companies to overestimate it’s effectiveness. However, given time to build a user base and become more attractive to recruiters, professional networking Facebook apps could boost interest in Facebook recruiting over the next year.

Only 55% of companies plan to increase their spending on social recruiting this year, though that’s much higher than the just 16% that plan on increasing spending on job boards. Increased interest in LinkedIn pushed the percentage of companies that have hired from social network recruiting up 6 points to 64% this year. LinkedIn also helped grow the total percentage of companies surveyed that plan on using social media for recruitment this year to 88.9%.

Some other key stats from Jobvite’s survey include:

• 64% of surveyed companies use at least two networks in their recruiting efforts, and 40% use three or more.
• Over the last six months 73% of all social hires came from LinkedIn, 20% from Facebook and 7% from Twitter
• Over the last six month, LinkedIn users received 52% of all social job referrals, while Facebook and Twitter each received 24%.
• Among companies anticipating increased hiring this year, 95% currently use or plan to use social recruiting.

The social recruiting applications we’ve profiled this year have great potential to increase recruiting efficiency and help companies find qualified and passionate employees. Jobvite Source makes it easy for recruiters to distribute trackable job opening links to the networks of their employees. Work For Us converts a Facebook Page’s fan into potential hires by showing them opening that match their profession and location. These companies have value to provide, so they may need to step up their marketing efforts to court the huge percentage of companies that aren’t recruiting on Facebook yet.