How LinkedIn’s brain decides who sees your content

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are tariff-free:

↘️ META: $7.01 | ↘️ TIKTOK: $3.22 | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $12.05

In this week’s edition: 

• 🧠 Here’s who’s advertising on ChatGPT

•  TikTok’s local tab is a game-changer ⏰

• ♾️ Meta unveils ad rules for the Midterms

But first…

💼 How LinkedIn’s new brain decides who sees your content

LinkedIn has swapped out a patchwork system of recommendation algorithms for an in-house AI system it calls 360Brew, and reviews have been mixed. Some creators say their organic reach has declined up to 50%. Some anecdotal evidence suggests brand pages are taking an even harder hit.

One silver lining worth holding onto: according to some metrics, engagement seems to be going up even as impressions go down. In theory, that’s the idea behind 360Brew: LinkedIn is building a centralized “brain” that analyzes profiles and content semantically, and that brain is getting pickier about who sees what.

It also means a fundamental shift in how your posts gain visibility: from "who you know" to "what's relevant." Your content now competes for attention across the entire platform, not just those in your network. And that means some of the old tricks won’t work. Broad, brand-awareness-style posting loses its home field advantage. On the upside: tight, specific, genuinely useful content has a bigger potential ceiling if the algorithm decides it belongs in front of the right people.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

🔎 Google’s new Scenario Planner makes its Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) tool, Meridian, way easier to use for marketers without coding chops. You can explore performance data, test budget scenarios and project ROI with natural-language prompts instead of technical queries. It’s designed to shift MMM from data science territory into everyday planning for media teams.

🧠 ChatGPT officially launched ads in its LLM responses as of February 9, and we’re getting our first look at the initial round of advertisers. According to AdWeek, those brands include Best Buy, Expedia, Qualcomm, and The Knot, who are believed to have paid at least $200,000 to participate in the beta-test program. Those ads are still vanishingly rare: search-insights firm Adthena performed a small test of about 500 prompts and found ads in just 0.08% of results.

⏰ TikTok is reversing course on the most unpopular decision of its post-sale U.S. transition. Shortly after the sale, TikTok announced the end of independent shipping on TikTok shop—essentially forcing merchants to use TikTok’s logistics services instead of handling their own fulfillment. Their message this week: jk, jk. “At this time, Seller Shipping remains unchanged,” the company wrote in an email, “and previously shared deadlines are not going into effect.” Translation: nevermind! 

🧭 TikTok has been testing a “Local Feed” since at least 2022, but U.S. users are about to get the full effect. Under a new tab on the home screen, Local is an opt-in feature “designed to help people stay connected to their community and discover what’s going on nearby,” including “travel, events, restaurants, and shopping, as well as posts from small businesses and local creators.” 

• 😎 Why the “opt-in” matters: TikTok has been at pains to justify its new privacy policy, after some users worried “that TikTok would now be tracking more personal information, which could, theoretically, see it used as a surveillance tool by its U.S. government-aligned ownership, if it chose,” according to SocialMediaToday.

🌎 Speaking of which, across the pond, TikTok has joined the European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) as a full digital member. The EASA represents 28 self-regulatory ad bodies across Europe. Why do we care? The sale of U.S. TikTok was driven by concerns that China was infiltrating ByteDance’s app for covert surveillance, so TikTok is now looking to increase its credibility on the international stage. And for advertisers, it’s also a meaningful step as TikTok leans into standardized ad compliance frameworks, putting it on the same framework with peers like Google and Meta, and strengthening brand safety controls and disclosure features.

♾️ Meta announced a blockbuster deal with Nvidia, the world’s leading AI-chip manufacturer, that locks in a key supply-chain component for Mark Zuckerberg’s quest to build “superintelligent” machines — and expand the marketing moat the company has built in digital advertising. The partnership includes collaborating on next-gen AI tools, and will bring Nvidia’s Confidential Computing to What’s App, “enabling AI-powered capabilities across the messaging platform while ensuring user data confidentiality and integrity.” 

🗳️ Meta is rolling out its election-cycle plan early: essentially re-upping the policies it’s used in past U.S. elections, and laying out how political content and ads will be managed on Facebook, Instagram and Threads leading up to November. Things to keep in mind as we gear up for the midterms:

• Any ads about elections, politics or social issues have to go through Meta’s authorization process, include a “Paid for by” disclaimer, and be archived in the public Ad Library for seven years, giving full visibility into who’s spending what and why. 

• Meta will again block new political/issue ads during the final week of the campaign, though ads that ran before that window can continue. 

• Meta is expanding how it labels content, requiring disclosures when political ads are AI-created or edited and surfacing “AI info” labels on organic content suspected of being machine generated to boost transparency. 

• Beyond ads, Meta plans to continue push notifications, official voting resources, and its Community Notes feature to help add context or corrections to misleading posts. 

👉 Our advice: if you’re in this universe, get started soon. There’s more upfront compliance work for political/issue campaigns, which can also impact brands navigating civic-adjacent content and issue ads.

🐦 X is now making $1 billion per year in subscription revenue, according to head of product Nikita Bier. For context: that’s less than half of X’s projected annual ad revenue. 

😵‍💫 Can X actually change someone’s political views? According to a new study published in the journal Nature, yes. In a 2023 study of 5000 existing X users, researchers found not only that X’s algorithm promoted conservative content at the expense of traditional media — it also found that “exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behavior.”

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

In the meantime, stay up to date with the latest performance marketing intelligence by following us on Linkedin, Instagram, and X.

This week’s edition of the Thread was created by Anoushka Madan and Carly Carioli.