TikTok: The video app adds a text feature as the social media war heats up

Chinese video streaming app TikTok says it will offer text-only posts as competition heats up between the social media giants.

Earlier this month, TikTok launched a new music streaming service for rival platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

The move comes as Elon Musk’s Twitter ditches the iconic Blue Bird logo and switches to a black and white X.

TikTok users will now be offered three options on the app – whether to post photos, videos or text messages.

They will also be able to customize posts by adding audio, location, or Duets, which are video reactions to other TikTok users’ posts.

“These features make your text posts as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo,” TikTok said in a statement on Monday.

This came just weeks after TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, launched a new music streaming service, TikTok Music, in Brazil and Indonesia.

Last week, the company also rolled out beta versions of the service in Singapore, Mexico, and Australia.

The program will allow users to “listen, share and download music they’ve discovered on TikTok, as well as share their favorite tracks and artists with their TikTok community,” a spokesperson said.

That year, the app also said it had more than 1 billion active users globally.

The competition between rival social media companies — such as owner of Instagram Meta and X, Musk’s rebranded Twitter platform — has intensified in recent weeks.

This month, the new Meta threading platform launched on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries, including the UK.

Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, later said his company’s threading platform had registered more than 100 million users in less than five days.

Also this week, the Blue Bird branding on social network Twitter has been replaced with a logo featuring a white X on a black background.

According to Musk, the term for tweets will also be changed to “x’s.”