Social video site TikTok it can consider itself as a self-presentation center on the Internet. However, even though it has been dominating static video, it has been missing something from all the other sites around the world for a long time: text. Thread and X (the artist formerly known as Twitter) are competing to make them hot again, and it seems that the Chinese platform has decided to join them.
The company announced this at the end of July 2023. Although its appearance was caught due to the Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg rivalry at the time, the lack of text alone was very painful for many TikTok users. Sure, you can add text to a photo or video, but that requires some effort on your part with the camera. The app’s posts are also not as rich as what Instagram offers where users post their stories.
How to make posts on TikTok
Open TikTok, then click the Create (+) button in the bottom center. Next, move the mode carousel from its default position Picture to Words.
You will be taken directly to the editor.
If you are familiar with editing in other formats on TikTok, you will have no problem doing it here. The top row contains formatting options, including outline styling, text justification, and color options. The line below that is your text type wheel (or description, depending on the style you’ve chosen). The upper left column controls the font size – there is a smaller size allowed for text than for text. You can also add emoji to your heart.
You cannot create multiple blocks with different styles or rotate them manually. Some blank lines will produce a symbol for unknown characters in that space. We don’t know why, but we’ll take it as a sign that the script has come out of the oven without doing well.
Another sign that this is the case is the lack of background color change. The company listed this as one of the user-friendly options, but it doesn’t look like we can change this. Guess we’ll be content with black for now.
At the top, you can choose a song to go with your post – you can choose a 15-second selection from a one-minute jump of the allowed music or take some lyrics from TikTok videos. Another note in the listening department: you can’t choose AI-generated speech to explain what you’ve written.
Scrolling down the column of buttons in the upper right corner:
- Notes can be saved if you exit the editor in the middle of creating a post. You can access it and restart the service by clicking this button. The button is broken as of the time of writing – I had two posts on my account and I could access them from my website, not the editor.
- Stickers it takes you to an amazing variety. You can also choose to upload your own photos, search for GIFs, or post things like @mentions or polls.
- Privacy preferences It’s pretty self-explanatory, but you can set your posts to be visible to everyone, just your friends (the people you follow who follow you), or just yourself. You can also set the audience selection as your default and change whether to allow comments on the post. In some cases, TikTok will allow other users to Duet with texts – you may need to allow this – but we do not see permission for this here.
When you’re ready to print, you can click any of the buttons below to send Your Story where it will disappear after 24 hours, or Send to Feed.
As we have said repeatedly, we hope that TikTok will fix the hard patches and add some missing pieces, so don’t be surprised if things change a little from what we have described.