TikTok has announced the launch of text-only posts, making it the latest tech company trying to cash in on people who might be looking for an alternative to Twitter.
Video-sharing platform TikTok announced Monday that it will now allow users to create “text-based content.” She credited this as “broadening the boundaries of content creation for everyone on TikTok” and “giving the written creativity we’ve seen in comments, captions, and videos its own space to shine.”
Users can also add colored backgrounds and stickers to the posts, which are limited to 1,000 words. Variety compared the feature to Instagram, where posts don’t become a conversation, but simply comment.
Website TechCrunch reported that the feature’s rollout “is likely to affect Twitter (now X) and Metas threads.” In his latest change since buying Twitter in October, Elon Musk this week rebranded Company X in what commentators called “extremely risky.”
Twitter is suffering financially and announced in July that its ad revenue fell by 50% as advertisers held back spending on the site. Competing tech companies have used the perceived chaos and turmoil created by Musk’s purchase of Twitter as an opportunity to attract some of its user base and launch competing platforms.
Threads is Instagram’s text-based app that capitalizes on the existing base of Instagram users and launched to much fanfare earlier this month. While Threads registered 100 million people less than five days after its launch, the number of active daily users has since fallen by 70%, Forbes reports.
According to the company’s website, TikTok has just over a billion users, while Instagram has 2.3 billion users, according to industry website Business of Apps.
TikTok’s audience is younger than Instagram’s. The UK communications regulator this week found it to be the number one source of news for 12-15 year olds, followed by YouTube and Instagram.
However, TikTok has faced criticism for its ties to China, with the governments of Canada, the US, the UK and Australia restricting the app’s use on state-owned devices. This week, the company announced that its China-based employees have access to some Australian user data.