October 2025
LinkedIn Goes Vertical, X Ditches Hashtags, Threads Turns Two
If your feed felt a little different this quarter, it wasn’t your imagination. From LinkedIn’s new ad formats to X’s ban on hashtags, here’s what Q3 threw at us.
- LinkedIn rolled out vertical video ads on desktop and mobile to align with short-form video trends
- LinkedIn continues to lean into engagement-first signals: conversational posts, meaningful comments, and share-driving content outperform broadcast announcements
- X introduced an AI Note Writer API to scale Community Notes contributions
- X banned hashtags in advertisements to simplify creative ad visuals
- Monthly active users have declined (~561M MAUs as of mid-2025)
- Meta turned two years old and rolled out Threads DMs to all users
- Instagram launched re-posts and Friend Map
- YouTube launched a new age detection process to protect younger users
- YouTube enabled an option to trim silence for podcast playbacks
- TikTok reached 200M EU users
- Bluesky reached 38M users, though post volume is declining