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Another social giant is getting into the text business.
TikTok is taking on Twitter and Instagram‘s Threads with a new feature that lets users add text posts.
“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,” the company said in announcing the new feature.
TikTok, which has seen explosive growth in the U.S. thanks to its creative tools for shortform videos and extremely effective recommendation algorithm, is attempting to seize on an opening from Elon Musk’s Twitter, which has made a series of strange decisions in recent months since the billionaire acquired the site.
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Over the weekend, Musk announced his intention to rebrand Twitter as “X,” with the Twitter bird logo disappearing Monday morning. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc. responded by fast-tracking Threads, a text-based Twitter competitor built off of Instagram. Threads launched earlier this month and has quickly become the first viable competitor to Twitter in the text-based social media space.
Of course TikTok, with its growth and addictive quality, is betting that by integrating text directly into its feeds it can peel off many of Twitter’s users. It is also adding tools that users can use to enhance their text posts, including sound, stickers and background colors.
TikTok’s text-based challenger comes in a crowded environment. Twitter (er, X?) is still a dominant, if declining, player, and Threads — which has seen its growth slow — is backed by the Meta juggernaut. Other smaller players like Truth Social seem more content to appeal to niches.
But TikTok, which has both fun, entertaining content and people explaining serious subjects, could be in position to steal time, particularly if it effectively integrates the text into its main feeds.
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