In an effort to lower the barriers of creation on TikTok and move beyond short-form video, the social-media platform has announced an expansion of in-app text posts that invite creators to share stories, poems, lyrics and other written content with their followers.
“With text posts, we’re expanding the boundaries of content creation for everyone on TikTok, giving the written creativity we’ve seen in comments, captions, and videos a dedicated space,” the company wrote in a blog post.
In trying to create a text post, TikTok users will access the Camera page then choose between three options: photo, video, and text. Selecting “text” will direct them to a text creation page where they can type whatever content they want included in their post
To enhance text posts, creators can add sound, tag a location, enable comments and position their posts alongside other users' posts via TikTok Duets feature.
Attempting to make text posts as dynamic as video or photo posts, TikTok is also introducing a range of features to help creators' compositions attract attention among their followers.
These include relevant stickers, tags and hashtags to align content with users and trends, various background colors, music, and the ability to store drafts before publishing.
Text posts have a 1,000-word limit.
Since Twitter (now X) began to see a downturn over a year ago, a host of apps have entered the text-based social space in attempts to bring on the original app's user base. With Meta’s text-based Threads app onboarding over 100 million users in less than two weeks, TikTok may be feeling the pressure to compete.