TikTok Introduces Text Posts: A New Way for Creators to Express Themselves
TikTok
TikTok has introduced Text Posts, a new way for creators to share text-based content. Text Posts are available on the Camera Page, which now has three options: Photo, Video, and Text. When creators select "Text," they are taken to a text creation page where they can start typing their content and customize it using features similar to those available for video and photo posts, such as stickers, tags, hashtags, background colors, and sound.
Text Posts are an addition to the many content formats that creators can use on TikTok, including videos, photos, and live streams.
With Text Posts, TikTok joins the ranks of Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, Spill, Post, and LinkedIn, all of which offer text-based experiences, as another competitor to X, formerly known as Twitter. Video is the core of TikTok, so it won't directly compete with X in the way that the others mentioned can. However, text-based content is abundant on the platform in the form of recipes, stories, poems, lyrics, and other written content. Now, creators have a dedicated space to continue creating this type of content, with the addition of new text-focused creators potentially joining TikTok.
TikTok's move into text-based content shows that even though short-form videos are all the rage today, there is still value in the written word. Additionally, it further highlights how social media platforms tend to start with one core format but eventually expand into other content formats to become a one-stop shop for creation and consumption. Last October, TikTok launched Photo Mode to support native photos, similar to Instagram. While the move initially met with some resistance from the TikTok community, Photo Mode has become quite popular, so it wouldn't be surprising if Text Posts have a similar journey.
Finally, with several text-based experiences, creators have the opportunity to repurpose text content across multiple channels easily, similar to what can be done for short-form videos across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Snapchat, while making necessary tweaks, of course.
