How to Use Kik – A Beginner’s Guide

Kik is a social media messaging app that has been around for several years. It brought together millions of users around the world, with an estimated 40% of American teens enrolled and actively using the app. SMS is very last century, Kik is the new way to communicate!

Kik was originally conceived as a better version of AOL Instant Messenger and has grown from there. The purpose of the design was to make Kik better looking, simpler to work with, and faster to use and communicate. There’s also a built-in privacy element when you create a username instead of sharing your mobile number. This works both for you and against you because anyone can use the app with the same anonymity.

Kik has another trick. It is a mini internet within an application. Kik has its own apps, its own web browser, its own video and music players, and other cool tricks. So you can listen to music, watch videos, view memes, browse Reddit, play games and more while chatting. All from Kik.

How to sign up for Kik

Obviously, to use Kik, you need to download and install a copy of the app for your device. Get it here for iPhone and here for Android. You can also use it on a Windows desktop or Mac, but this requires fairly specialized software and is beyond the scope of this article. Just focus on your mobile device for now.

Once installed on your device we can create an account and get started.

1. Tap on Register Account after Kik is installed.
2. Fill in your information, add a profile picture and create a username.
3. Allow or deny Kik access to your contacts on your device. Whether you allow this or not is entirely up to you. You can always allow it later if you don’t want it at first.
4. Tap Find People to find your friends or contacts. You’ll need usernames to be able to find them though.
5. Confirm your email address to complete account creation. Until you do this, you will not be able to use your account.

Chat and share on Kik

Chatting with your friends or contacts is as simple as you would expect from a messaging app.

1. Tap a contact and select Chat at the bottom of the screen.
2. Enter your chat text in the window and tap Send. Depending on which version of the app you’re using, Send may appear as a button or a speech bubble.
3. Add characters, emojis and regular messaging content as usual by selecting numbers, characters or emojis from the keyboard icons on your device.

Share videos and images on Kik

To share media, you need to allow Kik to access your images and videos. Kik does nothing more than send the media you say, but it’s important to know that the app has access to the media you create on your device.

To send a video or image:

1. Tap the picture or video above the message box.
2. Add an image or video or record a video.
3. Add a message to go with it if you want.
4. Tap Send or the speed bubble icon to send the media.

You can also send other content by tapping the small square icon above the chat box. Then you can post stickers, video links, Sketches, memes and your web history.

How to find people on Kik

All social media apps depend on having people to talk to to work with. Kik is no different. When it was first released, finding people wasn’t exactly intuitive, but it’s gotten a lot easier to understand since then.

You can search by username or phone book, or use a Kik code. The system does not search by real name, nickname, phone number or email address. It will only search using Kik usernames. This is good for privacy, but makes finding people a little harder than it should be.

1. Tap the big blue ‘+’ button at the bottom right of the front Kik screen.
2. Select Search by username, Start group, Scan Kik code or Discover bots.
3. Enter your criteria based on the selection you made.

As mentioned, Kik will only search by username. You should either know beforehand or receive it from your friends via regular SMS, e-mail, or you think you want to receive information from them.

Group chat on Kik

A powerful feature of Kik is its ability to group chat. You can gather up to 9 people in a group at once and chat, share media or do anything else that fits your collective fantasy.

1. Tap on the big blue ‘+’ button in the lower right corner of the main Kik screen.
2. Select Start group.
3. Give the group a name so it can be found.
4. Add people to the group by entering their username.
5. Start the conversation.

You can also use Kik code to add people to the group or use a group hashtag.

talk to the bot

Another nice feature of Kik is the kikbot. This is a real bot that can answer many basic Kik questions and even chat with you if no one you know is online.

1. Tap on the big blue ‘+’ button in the lower right corner of the main Kik screen.
2. Select Discover bots.
3. Scroll through the results to find a bot you want to chat with.
4. Tap on Bot and select ‘Start chat’ on the next page.

Bots are pretty good at maintaining a conversation, but not very good in group chats. There’s no reason why you should want a bot in a group chat though, just because you have real people to talk to. And even one-on-one, most bots won’t pass the Turing Test and will start to encounter speech impediments, so maybe you can save the bots for a very slow day.

Kik is a pretty good messaging app that does a lot of things well. It’s easy to use, fast, works with multiple media types, offers a security view, functions as its own mini-scanner, and has these bots. On the downside, finding other users is harder than it should be and requires you to share usernames in other ways to connect. But even this disadvantage is offset by the privacy it gives you, and once you connect with someone, it’s easy to communicate entirely within Kik.

Are you using Kik? Did you like it? Do you hate? Tell us about your experiences below! Maybe you’ll even find a few new people.