This is a small, but potentially valuable addition for your TikTok live-stream broadcasts. As noted by user Jonah Manzano, TikTok has added a new ‘LIVE intro’ option which enables you to add a short text description to welcome new viewers as they come across your broadcast.

As you can see in these example screens (re-shared by Matt Navarra), the new LIVE Intro option, when switched on, will display a short explainer to viewers when they come into your stream.

That could be a simple way to welcome viewers, and explain what your broadcast is all about, and what you would like them to do, as participants in your stream.

Live-streaming is gradually become a bigger element of TikTok as it looks to broaden its horizons beyond short video clips.

A key challenge with short clips is that they’re more difficult to monetize, because you can’t add mid or pre-roll ads into each specific upload, making direct monetization a challenge. Live-streaming enables more capacity on this front, while TikTok is also exploring longer videos, on-profile shops, promo tiles, product showcase options and more.

And with the app poised to become the third biggest social media platform in the world in 2022, trailing only Facebook and Instagram, it needs to expand its options in order to capitalize on its opportunities in this respect. Vine died out because it couldn’t facilitate monetization for its top stars, which saw them migrate to other platforms instead, and TikTok is now working to avoid the same fate by broadening its creative tools, in various ways.

It’s a smaller element within that overarching push, but live-stream intros are another tool to help maximize opportunities, and get more creators spending more time, and making more money, in the app.