In February, TikTok discreetly introduced “animated video stickers” for direct messaging, the business told TechCrunch. Video stickers are an evolution of TikTok Stickers, which launched in December and let users create and upload their own personalised graphics to be used in direct messages. Video stickers essentially function like GIFs.

Users have the option of making their own or selecting from famous video stickers shared by other users. Using this function, direct messages can be made more entertaining and interesting, according to product intelligence company Watchful.ai. In a direct message box, you can use the “create sticker” option if you wish to make your own sticker. You may then choose a video from your liked, posted, and favourite videos to create video stickers using either your own content or other people’s content that has been posted.

After choosing a video, you may choose how much of it you want to include in your video sticker by scouring through video-scrubbing thumbnails. You can also choose to trim the video or add text as a sticker. When finished, you have the option of saving the video sticker to your personal sticker library so that you may access it again in the DM favourites tab at any moment and send it to your friends. Alternately, you can decide to add it to TikTok’s sticker store so that other users can find and utilise the video sticker.

You don’t have to worry about using a creator’s film without their permission because TikTok states that it only displays videos with sticker permissions. By altering their privacy settings, creators can choose not to allow others to make video stickers based on their videos.

If you don’t want to make your own video sticker, you can browse through the most popular, trending, and newest video stickers on the app.

Despite the fact that TikTok direct messages have long supported GIFs thanks to a collaboration with GIPHY, the new function enables users to exchange app content in novel ways. For instance, you can share a specific section of a video by making it into a video sticker instead than just sending the entire video to someone over DM. You can also make a video sticker of a certain video segment that you and a friend find very amusing and frequently refer to. Of course, you may select from a variety of video stickers to respond to a message from a buddy, exactly to how GIFs are frequently used to express comments or you can create your own.

The debut coincides with TikTok’s most recent redesign of its direct messaging options. The business secretly changed its direct messaging settings earlier this year to let consumers select who they want to receive messages from. Now, you have the choice of contacting everyone, suggested friends, mutual followers, persons you’ve messaged, or nobody. Prior to this modification, only users who had designated one another as friends or who had been highly recommended may DM one another on the platform.