This week, TikTok announced that the platform added a text format to allow users to create posts using only words. Known for its highly visual posts that rely primarily on videos and photos, TikTok’s expansion follows Elon Musk’s controversial rebrand of Twitter (now known as X) and Meta’s release of text-sharing app Threads.
“Text is the latest addition to options for content creation, allowing creators to share their stories, poems, recipes, and other written content on TikTok — giving creators another way to express themselves and making it even easier to create,” TikTok announced on July 24.
Creating a text post on TikTok is similar to designing a video or photo entry. On the app’s camera page, users can choose a photo, video or text and customize their creation with features such as background colors, stickers, tags, hashtags and sounds.
The goal with these integrations, according to TikTok, is to ensure “text posts are just as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post.”
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It’s been a busy month in the social media world.
In early July, Meta (the company that owns Facebook and Instagram) launched a challenge to Twitter in the form of Threads, what it called a “separate space for real-time updates and public conversations” in a July 5 announcement.
The New York Times reported that Threads had more than 30 million downloads within the app’s first 16 hours. Many popular celebrities and millions of Twitter users appeared to jump ship from Twitter for the new app, prompting tech experts to refer to Threads as a potential “Twitter Killer.”
In the wake of Threads’ debut, Twitter owner Elon Musk unveiled his newest update to the social platform this past weekend by re-branding as X, an “everything app” that could encompass everything from messaging and video to online banking. In a July 24 tweet, he explained that the same day he launched the platform’s rebrand, his vision for the platform no longer matched the Twitter brand and its iconic mascot, the blue bird.
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“The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140-character messages going back and forth — like birds tweeting — but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video,” he said.
Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2023
Will you try TikTok’s text feature?
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