TikTok adds text posts to compete with Instagram Stories

TikTok absolutely dominates the short-form video space, but now it's looking into short-form text posts. The social media giant just announced a new text-composition feature to allow users to share their stories, poems, lyrics and other written content, giving them another way to express themselves."

The toolset seems simple enough. Just head to the app's Camera page and select text." You'll be able to type out whatever you want, add sounds, tag locations, enable comments and even integrate with Duets. The company says these text posts will be as interactive and dynamic as video and photo posts. To that end, you can also add background colors, hashtags and, of course, affix plenty of stickers.

Just like video and photo posts, you can save any text post as a draft for further edits or discard it entirely if you aren't sure the whole Internet needs to see your poem about pizza.

If this sounds a bit like using Instagram Stories to create a text-only post, you're certainly onto something. This wouldn't be the first time that TikTok looked to Instagram for inspiration (or vice versa!) Just last year it added static images to its toolset, accompanying short-form videos. TikTok's photo mode was met with near-universal scrutiny, but has gone on to become quite popular, and the company's certainly hoping this text mode will follow the same trajectory.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tiktok-adds-text-posts-to-compete-with-instagram-stories-161502542.html?src=rss