Analyzing 300+ social media posts from B2B companies

Date: Apr 24, 2023

Author: Sumeru Chatterjee

I analyzed 300+ social media posts from B2B SaaS companies

Executive Summary:

Best performing posts were in the Industry post category

Top engaged posts had polls, images or memes

Median post-performance was a low 84 even with a median of 20k followers

Top social brands (like Gong) play different:

Post more about Industry (42%) vs others (28%)
Post 2-3 a day, vs the usual advice of 2-3 times a week
Self promote a lot less (14%) vs others (49%)
See full analysis here

Time of day was not a major factor in post-performance

Let’s Dive In

I. Background

I started this study with a hypothesis - that corporate accounts that are good at social media do things differently.

I just had a feeling that companies like Gong were using a different strategy on social to build a strong audience and fanatical fan base.

But I didn’t have the data. I tried to see if reports from social media companies like Hootsuite, Sprout Social would have this, but came up blank.

So I decided to create it myself. I studied all LinkedIn posts in Q1 2023 from the following companies - Gong, Hubspot, Shopify, SimilarWeb and Appsflyer. For each post, I recorded what the post was about and how it performed. Find the full methodology in the appendix below.

II. Category - what do LinkedIn posts talk about?

Understanding the Category of Social Posts

The most important part of a social media post - what it talks about.

After studying hundreds of posts from various companies, I realized most corporate posts can be broken down into 6 main categories

These are:

Industry - educative content, insights, trends, content related to the problem the company solves, but no direct promotion of company’s products or services

Self-promotion - product launches, features, events, webinars etc, usually promoting something or has a CTA

Culture - current events, social trends, news, holidays, memes - e.g. Black History Month, Viral challenges etc

Customer - customer case study, customer spotlight etc

Corporate - company news, funding, company events, exec announcements, PR

Talent - employees shoutout, employer branding, workplace culture, awards etc

Here is the breakdown of all the posts by category across the data set:

Talking about your Industry seems to be the most popular at 42% (phew), followed by talking about yourself at 26% 😅

Talent, Corporate and Customers seem to take a back seat with less than 3% each

Now if you take away the top performer Gong from the data set, another story emerges:

Suddenly, Self-Promotion becomes the leader with 49% of posts, followed by Industry posts.

What do the most popular posts talk about?

Culture is the top leader

Self-promotion comes in at a surprising #2, followed by Industry

Next, I wanted to see how the post category varies between top social accounts like Gong vs the others.

Almost 50% of posts were about Industry vs 28% from others

Only 14% of posts were Self-Promotion vs 49% from others

Gong had 170 posts in Q1 vs 87 posts for the other 4 companies combined

Basically, top-performing social accounts talk a lot less about themselves, and a lot more about the industry they are in.

This makes sense to me from a social strategy perspective, but glad to see the data corroborate that.

Read the full analysis of Gong’s LinkedIn strategy here

III. Creative - Text, Images or Carousels?

Understanding the `Creative` types used in Social Posts

What creative types are used in LinkedIn posts the most?

Photos are the most popular

Followed (surprisingly) by video, then text

What are all these videos about, you ask?

Drum roll….

Most are Self-Promotion 😢

These are mostly productlaunches, launches & corporate announcements.

The only exceptions are from category leader Gong that posted a few videos in the Culture and Industry category.

What is the top-performing creative type?

The quick answer is Polls. But I think that’s partly because of how I’ve defined the performance of a post. For this study, I defined performance as:

engagement = likes + comments + shares + poll votes)

Polls usually get lots of votes, which boosts their engagement score

So then, what is the top-performing creative type that’s not a poll?

The answer is more evenly distributed, but photos seem to be the front-runner.

But a little surprised to see that Text posts don’t appear anywhere near the top.

P.S.

Get access to the database used in this report - over 300+ LinkedIn posts from B2B SaaS companies like Gong, Hubspot, Shopify and SimilarWeb

Get The FULL Database of 300+ LinkedIn Posts

Features:

Built on Notion

Easy to duplicate

Easy to filter, sort and organize

Easy to tag.

View as a table, gallery or Kanban board

Links to the original posts

Screenshots from the original post

Filter, sort posts by:

Date

Creative Type

Post Performance

Post Category

Next Steps:

Step 1: Make this analysis more robust by adding more companies.

🙋🏼‍♂️

P.S. → Have a company you think I should add to this study? DM me on LinkedIn and let me know

Step 2: Explore further hypothesis

I have a new hypothesis - posts from personal profiles are outperforming corporate accounts. I don’t have the data to prove it yet, but this would be interesting to study

—

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Love, chips and guac

Sumeru

Questions or Comments?

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Appendix

Methodology

For this study, I looked at LinkedIn posts from Q1 2023.

For each post, I recorded:

> Post-performance (likes + engagement)

> Creative type (text, photo, video, poll etc)

> Post type (self-promotion, customer story, industry insight etc)

> Post Date

> Screenshot

> Post Link

(the definitions of each are in the Appendix below)

Companies I studied included Gong, Hubspot, Shopify, SimilarWeb, Appsflyer

Here is the breakdown of the posts recorded:

#005: Analyzing 300+ LinkedIn Posts from B2B companies