The social network TikTok launched Monday a new tool which allows the publication of messages containing only text, a novelty for this platform devoted so far to the image, which thus comes directly to compete with Twitter.
This new feature allows users “to share their stories, their poems, their words [de chanson] and other written content, which gives creators another way to express themselves,” the subsidiary of Chinese group ByteDance said in a statement. TikTok offers users who create written content to add audio, indicate a position, allow comments or accept the “Duets” mode, which gives the possibility of appearing their own message alongside that of another creator.
Built around short videos, which have made its popularity, TikTok is looking to expand its offer. In particular, it gradually increased the maximum length of its videos from 15 seconds, when it launched in 2017, to 10 minutes, to compete with one of its big rivals, YouTube, which itself created its short content platform, YouTube Shorts, inspired by TikTok.
This new breed of text-only posts is one more alternative to the king of text-centric social networks, Twitter, rebranded as X on Monday, whose hegemony is increasingly being challenged. In addition to the newcomers Mastodon, Bluesky, T2 or Substack Notes, there is also Threads, which the giant Meta launched in early July and which today has 117 million users, according to the specialized firm Quiver Quantitative.
Like Meta, TikTok benefits from its reach, which is around 1.4 billion monthly active users, according to the specialized site Business of Apps. But unlike Facebook’s parent company, it opted to integrate a new text-only feature into its app rather than launch a separate product, as Meta did with Threads.