Most of the talk around social media is about how you can raise your online profile, be more visible, and build your network. However, there is another side of social media – the one that makes you smarter.  The following are six tips for using social media to your advantage.

1. Follow, friend and link up with smart people. Smart people share interesting and informative articles over social media. Don't just limit yourself to following people in your industry; follow experts who write about local business, the economy, innovation, marketing, entrepreneurship, management, and leadership.

2. Use Twitter search like a pro. Want to know the latest about what's going on? Get to know Twitter search and you can find real time information. Located at the top of any twitter page, you can search for relevant industry terms like #CRE to find out what people are saying about the commercial real estate industry. Since #CRE by itself might yield too much information, you can hone down your search by adding your city, state or specialty like Hotels or REITs. Hash tag marks (#) are used to clarify that they are a category tag.

3. Follow companies on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been beefing up their company pages. If there are important companies in your area, you can follow them on LinkedIn to keep on top of what they are doing.

4. Create customized feeds in Hootsuite [Hootsuite.com]. Once you've been on Twitter a while, you will probably be following enough people so that you might miss the important ones.  You can avoid this problem by creating Twitter Lists of important people on twitter and then using a tool like Hootsuite, which is a social media dashboard, to create customized streams from your lists. Is there a certain search you do often on Twitter? Hootsuite can also make a permanent stream based on that search.

5. Favorite tweets that you want to read later. One good use of the Twitter “favorite” tool is to favorite a tweet that may contain an article that you want to read later. This way you can find it by searching for your favorites either on Twitter or creating a stream for favorites on Hootsuite.

6. Use an add-on email tool like Rapportive [Rapportive.com] If you use gmail, you can install an extension called Rapportive. Rapportive brings up a sidebar in your gmail interface and pulls in the social media profiles of anyone with whom you emailing. This way you not only see a picture of your contact, but also recent tweets and quick links to their online profiles.

Diane K. Danielson is the Chief Platform Officer of Sperry Van Ness International Corporation, a commercial real estate franchisor headquartered in Irvine, CA.