TikTok quietly launched "animated video stickers" for direct messages in February, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Video stickers work essentially like GIFs and are an expansion of TikTok Stickers that the company rolled out last December, which lets users create and upload their own custom images to be used in direct messages.
Users can browse through popular video stickers uploaded by other users or create their own. This is according to a discovery made by the product intelligence firm, Watchful.ai. The new feature makes direct messages a lot more fun and entertaining. For those who have ever wanted to create a personal sticker, you now can by tapping on "create sticker" in the direct message window. From there, you will be able to choose video from your liked, posted and favorite videos, meaning you can either create video stickers from your very own content or from the ones posted by others.

By choosing a video, then you can use video scrubbing thumbnails in order to select how much of video you want to be on your video sticker. There is also the choice of adding text to the video sticker or cropping the content. After working on it, you'll have the option to save the video sticker in the personal sticker library from which you can find it when you want to send a copy to your friends with the DM favorites tab open. Or, you can choose to add it to the sticker store in TikTok, and so other users will also be able to find and utilize the video sticker.

According to TikTok, the site only posts videos with sticker permissions, so you have no reason to fear that you might have been misusing a creator's video without consent. Creators can change their settings in order to opt out of allowing others to create video stickers based on their videos.

It you don't want to roll your own video sticker you can browse top, trending and new video stickers made by people and in turn used on the app

While you have been able to send GIFs inside direct messages on TikTok through partnership from GIPHY for a rather sometime; there now is a feature that avails ways through which this content can be shared via the app in different avenues. For example, you can share just a part of a video by converting it into a video sticker, rather than just sharing the entire video with a friend via DM. Or maybe there's just a section of a video that you and your friend keep referring to because it's really funny. And of course, just like how GIFs are used to share reactions, you can choose from a selection of video stickers to react to a message from a friend, or create your own.

Already having proven itself as a viable entertainment platform, TikTok likely has set its sights on expanding the social features of its app in hopes that people will spend even more time using it. With WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram already having stickers that users can send to one another through direct messages, it doesn't come as a shock that TikTok is going to expand its sticker offerings to focus on what it is known for: video.

The launch comes as TikTok recently revamped its direct messages settings. Earlier this year, the company quietly expanded its direct messaging settings to give users a choice of who they want to receive messages from. The options are now everyone, suggested friends, mutual followers, people you’ve sent messages to, or no one. Before this, only users on the platform that had been marked as friends or were recommended by people could send a DM to each other.