TikTok Unveils Game-Changing New Feature as the Battle Between Elon Musk's 'X,' Mark Zuckerberg's Threads Heats Up The app isn't just for short-form videos anymore.
By Amanda Breen
Key Takeaways
- TikTok will allow users to create text-based content to share stories, recipes and more.
- The update comes amid an ongoing social media rivalry between Threads and X, formerly Twitter.
TikTok rose to fame with its short-form videos during the pandemic, but, like so many platforms hoping to keep their audience's attention, it's undergoing some changes.
Creators have had LIVE videos, photos, duets and stitches in their toolboxes for some time. Now, they can experiment with text-based content — suited for sharing stories, recipes and more, TikTok announced yesterday.
Related: Threads Is Already Making Changes Amid Meta's Twitter Fight
"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 wrote in a published post.
The news comes amid an ongoing social-media-platform battle for users and engagement.
Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter to "X," which he intends to transform into an "everything app," is now official, and Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter rival Threads, owned by Instagram parent company Meta, launched just a few weeks ago.
And in yet another turn, Musk might have some trouble with Twitter's "X" rebrand, as Meta has already registered an "X" logo and may hold the rights to it, per Insider. (Google's Moonshot Factory is also called "X.")
Threads started strong, exceeding 100 million users in just five days, but its user engagement dropped 70% to just 13 million by July 21, according to Sensor Tower data reported by The Wall Street Journal. The same data estimated that Twitter's daily active users have held firm at 200 million.
Related: Twitter Is Now 'X,' Rebranding as an 'Everything App' | Entrepreneur
As of March, TikTok claimed approximately 50 million daily users in the U.S., CNBC reported.