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TikTok Adds Text-Based Posts, but Its Not Really Aimed at Becoming a Twitter Rival

TikTok has added the ability to create text-based posts — alongside its central short-form video format — although the move is more about giving users a new option for sharing content, rather than representing a new challenge to Elon Musk’s Twitter (which is rebranding as X) or Instagram’s Threads.

TikTok’s new text posts have a 1,000-character limit. Users can customize their text posts by adding a sound (such as song snippets), tagging a location, enabling comments and allowing Duets, among other features. Unlike Twitter or Threads, on TikTok, text-based posts aren’t designed to facilitate a conversation — TikTok posts still function more like Instagram posts, which followers may be able to comment on but that’s not the main point.

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TikTok says text posts on the app are “a new format for creating text-based content that broadens options for creators to share their ideas and express their creativity. 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 to shine.”

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With the new text feature, TikTokers can share “stories, poems, lyrics and other written content on TikTok,” the ByteDance-owned app said in a blog post.

Note that TikTok creators have already been posting text messages, using the photo photos feature (although that’s required the extra step of creating an image with text).

Text posts on TikTok can include stickers, tags and hashtags, and different background colors. As with video or photo posts, users can save text drafts and store them with other unpublished posts for later editing (or discard them entirely).

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