I think an underrated feature of Twitter is your ability to curate lists of users.

Lists can be public or private. Some people use private lists (only accessible to the creator) to keep an eye on what their competition is doing, while some use public lists as helpful resources for followers... or to do this:

Lists allow you to see a certain segment of the Twitterverse at a time. For example, you could make a list of news sources to monitor happenings in your industry or you could subscribe to a list someone else has already made.

If you find that you follow a lot of accounts, you can use lists to make your Twitter world smaller. Create a list of people whose content you really care about seeing, like friends and colleagues.

If there are users you don’t want to publically follow, you can still see their posts in a private list. You might want to make a private list of competitors, followers that you like interacting with, or accounts having to do with your weird interests.

I want to maintain a good ratio of followers to follow-ees, so I can’t follow every tempting account I see. But with lists, I don’t have to!

Want to get started with lists? Here are the most popular ones, according to AdWeek.

Use lists to stay on top of everything in your world and make everyone wonder how you do it!

​❤ Bayley

Last week, Twitter blessed (?) a percentage of its users with the ability to compose 280-character Tweets, as opposed to the traditional 140. Although it's only in the test stage at this point, the entire platform is expected to move to 280 characters soon. (By the way, if you're one of of the plebs like me who still has only 140 characters, there is a work around to hop on the #280 train.)

The change was inspired by the differences in the amount of meaning conveyed by individual characters across languages (a sentence takes more characters to express in English than in Mandarin, for example.) You can read more about the reasoning here.

The 140-character limit was Twitter's trademark, integral to their brand, and while 280 characters doesn't sound like a lot, the new, longer Tweets look daunting.

So far, I'm not a fan and I'm not alone. Twitter already has the thread feature (linking many Tweets together in a chain) for longform ideas, so users aren't limited in any real way by the 140 character limit.

So, if you plan on taking advantage of the new, longer limit, I would strongly suggest inserting line breaks in your Tweets, so they don't appear so blocky and dense. (And report the neo-Nazis, please.)

​❤ Bayley