TikTok launches text-only posts to compete with Twitter just a week after Meta’s Thread lost 70% of its user base

Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker once said, “Anyone who has bet against Elon Musk has lived to regret it.” Apparently, Meta and TikTok did not get that memo.

Just last week, Threads, Meta’s so-called Twitter killer and a supposed rival to Twitter, experienced a nearly 70% decline in the number of daily active users since its peak on July 7, according to data from SimilarWeb and Sensor Tower, market intelligence firms.

But when you thought TikTok will learn a lesson from Meta’s Threads disaster, the Chinese short-video app seems undeterred just as Twitter alternative platforms like Mastodon, Meta’s Threads, BlueSky, Spill, and Truth Social vie to take on Twitter’s microblogging dominance.

On Monday, TikTok announced the launch of its own text-only posts to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter, The Verge reported.

The news came just a day before The Wall Street Journal’s report that TikTok is planning to launch an e-commerce platform in the US to sell Chinese-made goods as it aims for US market domination.

Meanwhile, it appears TikTok is keen on capitalizing on the upheaval at Twitter following its acquisition by Elon Musk for $44 million last year. The new feature will allow TikTok users to select different backgrounds for their text posts, complete with hashtags and the ability to tag other users. The Verge states that these new TikTok posts will resemble Instagram Stories and have a character limit of 1,000.

“Text posts appear similar to Instagram Stories visually: users can add a background color, edit how text appears, and add music and stickers to the post. Posts have a 1,000-character limit (yes, I tested it to find out). Other users can also engage with the post similar to how they interact with video — by stitching, dueting, and commenting,” The Verge said.

Interestingly, the launch news coincides with Musk’s decision to rebrand Twitter as X and remove the iconic blue bird logo, as part of his vision to create an “everything app.”

Launched in 2016, TikTok has become a growing global phenomenon due to its ability to quickly get its users addicted to its short-form viral videos loved by millions of youths. In just a few years after its launch, TikTok now has over 1 billion users in more than 150 countries. The TikTok app has been downloaded over 210 million times in the United States alone.