How does Brigette Hyacinth get such massive engagement for her LinkedIn content?

I shamefully confess that I’d never heard of Brigette Hyacinth until last Friday. 

It was only when I was looking at the engagement performance of LinkedIn content on other social platforms such as Facebook, that I discovered she was responsible for 6 out of the 7 top performing LinkedIn articles of the last 12 months globally (data courtesy of Buzzsumo).

Let’s look at this specific example.

On LinkedIn itself, it generated over 370,000 reactions and over 8000 comments.

But it had an even bigger reaction on Facebook. A whopping 6.9 million likes, nearly 1 million shares and over 400,000 comments. And 100pc "Love" emoji reactions. Her other top performing posts aren’t too far behind in terms of engagement performance.

When people ask who are the “big hitters” on LinkedIn, she surely would be in the top 5.

Most brands, let alone individuals, would give their eye teeth for these kinds of engagement metrics.

So are there are any clues as to how she has achieved this level of reaction to her content on LinkedIn and beyond?

First, she has a huge number of followers on LinkedIn – currently just a shade under 3 million. So every time she writes an article or post, she already has a head start on most people in terms of the raw number of users who will see her content. However, you don't get 3 million LinkedIn followers overnight.

Surely part of the reason she has gained such a sizeable audience is that she has built it over time - and she has also been relentlessly consistent in publishing content.

The link above is to her first LinkedIn article published on June 19th, 2014 – which is pretty much the time when LinkedIn first allowed individual users to treat their profile as a blogging platform. This one garnered 563 reactions and 210 comments. Pretty good for a first LinkedIn article.

There was a gap of a few months until her next article on September 1st, June 2014. But from that point on, she has clearly made a point of posting articles regularly – a total of 178 articles to date over a 6 year period – that’s one article on average every 2 weeks without fail over 6 years.

Looking at the engagement performance for those posts over time, are there important points where we can detect a step change in numbers? 

Although having gained reaction and comment numbers that most would dream of through 2017, it was this following post that really knocked it out of the park – a massive 820,000 reactions and over 21000 comments.

It was after this point that more of her posts began to generate similar levels of reaction and engagement. Interestingly, many of her best performing posts take their cue from Richard Branson quotes – himself no slouch on LinkedIn with 17.3 million followers.

This next post gained an incredible 1.1 million reactions - surely a record?

Topic wise, again, she has been relentlessly consistent around publishing content around her field of expertise. And there is one other factor that also clearly works well in her favour - her content displays incredible "evergreen" scores. This is a Buzzsumo metric which looks at how well content continues to be shared and engaged with long after it was first published. All of her content seems to display this quality of having longevity (which is clearly the exception as the vast majority of social media content has a very short shelf life - or no life at all).

So what can the budding LinkedIn influencers take from all of this? Should we all be aspiring to generate these levels of engagement with our own content?

Although I'm all for ambitious targets, there are clearly some hard facts to be acknowledged.

First, there is clearly an enormous amount of time and effort required. Commitment is essential. Are you prepared to commit to writing and generating the level of quality content required?

Second - you aren't going to generate a huge audience overnight - you have earn it over time. Even if you have far more modest target levels, don't underestimate how long it may take and the investment needed.

Third - can you consistently come up with type and kind of content that resonates so universally with an audience over time?

And having said all of this, what knock on effect does all of this massive engagement and reaction have on other channels?

For example, according to SimilarWeb, her website has had an average of about 8000 visitors per month over the last 3 months. LinkedIn is easily the biggest driver of this traffic, generating around 67pc of all visits

Searches for her name are around 3500 per month globally according to SEMRush - over a third in the US.

The point to bear in mind here is that there is no guarantee that massive levels of engagement on one platform will automatically translate into similar levels of traffic and engagement elsewhere.

I'm sure there are many other factors to take into consideration. Please use the comments below to share your own thoughts and insights.