TikTok limits what a business can send in a direct message, and treats photos differently from most other channels. This article covers what you can send, what customers can send you, and the cases where a photo behaves in a way you would not expect.

What you can send

  • Text — up to 6,000 characters.
  • Photos — JPG or PNG, up to 3 MB.

That is the whole list. Video, voice messages, audio and files such as PDFs cannot be sent through TikTok at all. This is TikTok's restriction rather than a gap in the Trengo composer, so it applies to every platform connected to TikTok.

What customers can send you

Incoming messages are far less restricted. All of these reach you in the ticket:

  • Text
  • Photos
  • Stickers and emoji
  • Videos

Video reaches you in two forms and they behave differently. A video the customer records or uploads in the chat arrives as a video message and plays in the ticket. A post shared from TikTok is a link to something already on the platform: it arrives labelled as a shared post rather than a player, so you open it in TikTok to watch it. Shared posts are by far the more common of the two. An AI agent cannot read either – it replies to text only.

A photo and its text are two messages

TikTok has no caption field on an image, so a photo sent together with text arrives as two separate messages and uses two of your allowance. The composer will not let you send both at once, but a journey, rule or AI agent still can — so on a conversation an automation has touched, the count can drop by two at a time. See TikTok messaging limits for how the allowance works.

Photos do not work in every country

Sending a photo only works when both you and the customer are in a country where TikTok allows images in direct messages. TikTok has not published the list of those countries, and does not tell us where a customer is, so this cannot be checked before sending.

If one side is not supported, the photo fails to send and the error does not say why: TikTok returns the same code it uses when a message limit has been reached, so the two cannot be told apart. If a photo fails on a conversation where text is going through normally, the customer's country is the likely cause.

AI agents cannot read video

An AI agent replies to text. It cannot watch a video a customer sends, and will ask for a description instead. TikTok is a video-heavy channel, so this is worth weighing before enabling an AI agent on it — Trengo shows a note about it when you select a TikTok channel during setup.

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