Gong's LinkedIn Strategy, Analyzed with Data

If you’re in the B2B SaaS space, it’s hard to miss the story of Gong.io. This company went from a no-name startup to an $8B sales tech unicorn in less than 5 years, making it one of the fastest-growing B2B companies ever.

Gong’s LinkedIn Virality

One of the pillars of Gong’s meteoric rise has been it’s revered social media strategy. Gong has consistently broken out from the crowd on social media. They grew a massive, engaged audience fairly quickly on a platform that’s known for mostly dry, corporate-y content: LinkedIn

Here’s the truth: most B2B brands I come across have boring LinkedIn accounts 🥱 Their content is mostly self-promotional

But Gong had a different idea and they executed a different playbook.

💡

Gong went from 0 to 100k+ followers on LinkedIn in ~3 years, and today boasts over 200,000 followers.

Since Gong sells to sales leaders (mostly B2B, mostly in tech), their social media is focused on LinkedIn, where their customers naturally spend time.

But while a lot of marketers and sellers intuitively know Gong has a great LinkedIn account, I wanted more rigorous data into what makes them different

So I decided to analyze their last 200 LinkedIn posts, and dive into the data on what makes them different.

Quick Disclaimer:

I worked at Gong between 2019-20, when they were a Series A company with ~4M in revenue. Today they are $250M+ in ARR, and worth over $7B as per their last raise. Gong did not ask me to write this article, nor did I have any access to proprietary data. I continue to be a shareholder though and do sincerely hope the company continues to do well 🤞🏼

How I Got This Data:

I manually went to Gong’s LinkedIn profile and took a screenshot of all their LinkedIn posts from Q1 2023.

I also did this for several other B2B brands like Shopify, Hubspot and Appsflyer to get insight into what other companies are doing on LinkedIn.

For each post, I recorded:

Post-performance (likes + comments + shares)

Creative Type (text, photo, video, poll etc)

Post Category (self-promotion, industry, culture, corporate comms etc)*

Post Date

Screenshot

Post Link

Click this toggle for detailed definitions:

Engagement = Likes + Comments + Shares + Reposts + Votes (polls)

Creative Types:

Text
Photos
Carousals / pdfs
Video
Polls

Post Category:

Industry (educative content, industry insights & trends, data, content related to the problem the company solves, but no direct promotion)

Customer (customer case study, customer spotlight etc)

Self-Promotion (product launch, features, event, webinar etc, usually promoting something or has a CTA)

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

Corporate (company news, funding, company events, exec announcements, PR etc)

Talent (employees shoutout, hiring, work culture, talent branding etc)

Post Date: Estimated date of when the post was posted (since exact dates are not available on LinkedIn)

Post Link: Link to the original post

Quick Summary of the Data:

170 posts in 90 days

Over 100K engagements (likes, comments, shares and poll votes)

All creative types used - text, photo, video, polls, carousal and articles

Estimated 5-6M impressions over the period

Here is what Gong does differently on LinkedIn:

Let’s break down what Gong is doing differently on LinkedIn.

#1. Posts more about INDUSTRY topics

💡 49% of Gong’s posts were about industry topics….

Industry posts are content related to the problem the company solves, but no direct promotion of the company’s products, services or team

Examples of Industry posts:

Gong stands out from the crowd by posting more about their industry - trends, insights, cheat sheets, data and POV that helps their ideal buyer (sales people) get better at their craft.

The content focuses on sales strategies, backed by data they have collected from millions of sales calls. I’ll break down their data-backed social strategy in the next post.

Other companies only post about Industry topics 29% of the time, or about 20% less than Gong (see below)

#2. Gong posts less about THEMSELVES

Only 17% of Gong’s posts were self-promotional (talking about features, events, products etc) vs a whopping 48% from other companies

Self-Promotion includes talking about all the things that have to do with your company or what you sell . These types of posts typically have a CTA (Call to Action) such as “Sign Up” or “Register Below”

Examples of Self-Promotion posts include:

White-paper or blog post

Upcoming webinar invite

Award or recognition achieved

Partnership announcement

This is one of the main culprits on why content from B2B LinkedIn accounts is so terrible - they’re busy talking about themselves.

Here are some examples of self-promotional posts:

#3. Posts MORE in general

Gong posted 14 times per week vs the avg of 3 posts a week for others

By posting more, Gong increases their surface area of luck - more likely that one of their posts will perform well and generate large engagement.

This goes against the traditional advice of posting 2-3 times / week and avoiding the algorithm “ding” of over-posting.

4. Gong is not afraid to use memes and cultural moments

Example: One of their best best-performing post in Q1 was just 4 words … with a screenshot from Twitter

This post has over 30,000 engagements with an estimated ~3M impressions

Here’s another recent example:

This post hits a cultural nerve about corporate email greetings that we all receive. far too often

Gong is well known on LinkedIn as being one of the few B2B brands that isn’t afraid to use memes and other cultural moments to get viral attention. This gives Gong’s content a unique “voice” and makes them sound more personal and personable, rather than corporate.

Results: Gong’s Massive LinkedIn Engagement

Gong generates A LOT of impressions on LinkedIn

Quick Stats:

170 posts in Q1 ‘23

107,000+ total engagements (like + comments + shares + poll votes)

Median engagement = 83 / post …. 60 / post if you exclude polls

Avg engagement = 530 / post … 337 / post if you exclude polls

That’s an estimated 6,000 impressions per post

Impressions: This LinkedIn doesn’t show post impressions on others’ posts (like Twitter does), there is no way to know the exact impressions that Gong generates.

Here is my estimate:

Non-poll total engagements was 52k for Q1,

Impressions are usually 100X engagements (based on my experience managing multiple social media accounts)

Therefore….

💡 Gong had an estimated 6M impressions in Q1 2023

The Next Question:

From the data it is clear Gong stands out from the B2B crowd on LinkedIn. It is clear WHAT they are doing differently.

The next question is - HOW is Gong able to maintain an edge on LinkedIn? What do they do internally to allow for the social media team to be so disruptive, innovative and on trend?

In the next post, I will break down the ‘Inside Out’ strategy Gong uses to actually execute their LinkedIn Strategy.

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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

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#007: Gong’s Viral LinkedIn Strategy Analyzed