5 Best Tools to Measure Share of Voice

How many times have you come up with a brilliant idea, business or otherwise, only to find out later that someone had already thought about it? Nowadays, no matter what industry you're operating in, you'll always have competition.

Without keeping your eye on the market and your competitors, especially on social media, it's impossible to figure out your strengths and your weak spots that you need to work on. That's when the Share of Voice metric comes into play.

Calculating your Share of Voice is easy, just use the following formula: take the number of your brand mentions, divide it by the total number of any brand mentions in the market, including yours plus those of your competitors, and multiply by 100 (we’ll speak more about this easy calculator below).

But there are so much more you can learn from Share of Voice: what users say about your brand, what they say about your competitors, measure your reputation, discover your potential.

In this blog post, I'll explain what Share of Voice is, what business insights you can derive by measuring it, and how to calculate your Share of Voice using Awario (or any other social listening tool). Let's start with the first question.

What is Share of Voice and why does it matter for brands on social media?

The value of competitive analysis is clear: you can’t find your exact niche, define UVP, and determine on your development and marketing strategies without it. To assess the market clearly, you have to know the share of market of each of your competitors. While the actual market share is pretty much impossible to assess, you can use Share of Voice (or SOV – an abbreviation of the definition) as a substitute metric.

Traditionally, it's been measured for paid advertising, i.e. how many ads traffic you run on TV channels, in print, or via social media compared to your competitors. However, digital marketing allows you to go even further and compare your brand awareness with your competitors.

Social listening enables you to count how many times your brand or products are mentioned online, with a big share of social media, and then compare it to your competitors' mentions. In my humble opinion, this metric is much more helpful since you can understand how many people actually mention your brand, and not just glaze over your ads on TV.

In addition, SOV is a good social analytics tool for measuring awareness of your company among users of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms with the help of smart metrics. Also, it can help you estimate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts on different social media.

Let's discuss how exactly knowing your Share of Voice can be beneficial for your business.

Why is measuring Share of Voice important for brands?

While SEO optimization brings visibility, and marketing metrics such as customer engagement, brand awareness, and net promoter score indicate the level of business development and popularity in various media such as online brochures and articles, only Share of Voice puts your success into the context of the market and allows you to see the industry through the eyes of a consumer.

Share of Voice monitoring is truly a multi-purpose tool that can be helpful for different departments (not for marketers only) and in different scenarios. Here are some of the benefits you get when measuring and tracking your Share of Voice:

Competitive analysis: check out brands’ current social Share of Voice

Using a web and social media analytics tool like Awario allows you to tap into the specific mentions and obtain valuable data insights based on metrics data.

For example, comparing several brands in Awario reveals how their original Share of Voice changes with time, which brand has a higher percentage of positive and negative sentiment, what topics are brought up most often in relation to each brand via different media, where in the world your consumers are and more.

Organic customer feedback: what do they share and discuss on social media?

Social listening allows you to analyze actual mentions of your and your competitors' brand and products which means that you get access to unbiased voice of the customer for the entire niche you're working with.

By looking at the mentions of your competitors, you can find out how to make your own products and services more appealing. Using Awario, you can engage with individual customers (users of a particular social media platform or website) directly from the tool to recommend your product that would solve their issue. You can also notice trends in the conversations and moods in talking and change your business strategies according to the unfilled gap in the market.

Campaign tracking: is it going viral or failing on social media?

First of all, when monitoring online mentions of your competitors, you can discover what marketing campaigns of theirs are mentioned the most and see the target audience's reaction to them.

Secondly, if there are several rival marketing campaigns running at the same time, you can calculate the SOV for each. This will help you see which campaign was the most successful in reaching the target audience (mind you, all the campaigns are competing for the same target audience) and what made it so successful. Awario will also break down what share of your target audience responded more to which campaigns and in which media: you may discover that while your competitor's campaign was more popular with men in England, your campaign got more positive buzz from women in the US and find an explanation and data insights behind this trend.

So now that we know why we should measure the Share of Voice, let's figure out how to do it.

How to measure social Share of Voice?

Now that we know what is share of voice and why we should measure it, we can go through the stages of how to measure SOV. I'll be using Awario for calculation and analyzing social listening data. If you work with a different tool for this purpose, the workflow should be similar but steps 3 and 4 may differ depending on the metrics your tool provides.

Step 1. Create alerts for your brand and your competitors

The first step in collecting your Share of Voice is figuring out how often you and your rivals are mentioned online. To do that, you need to create social media brand monitoring alerts for each of the brands on the market. I'd also recommend creating an alert with niche-specific keywords and go through these mentions in order to identify some competitors you might have missed.

Your keyword will be the brand or product name. If it's a common word that's often used in a different context, you might want to switch to Boolean search to specify the spelling (for example, only collect the mentions that spell the keyword in upper case) or add some negative keywords.

If you're interested in the market of a particular country, you can specify the location of the mentions. You can also specify the data range and sources of mentions, including websites and social media.

Once you set up alerts for each of your competitors, you can start calculating your Share of Voice.

Step 2. Calculate the Share of Voice and get a detailed brand report

How to measure online visibility of several brands? Awario is able to automatically measure SOV for three brands (with the number being expanded to 15 brands in the near future). However, if you have more than two competitors, which you probably do, there's a simple Share of Voice formula that allows you to calculate the SOV for any share of brands:

SOV = Your brand’s online mentions/Total online mentions x 100

You can find the total number of mentions by selecting multiple alerts in the Mention Statistics report. This way Awario will show you the total number of mentions for all the alerts selected in various media.

For example, let's say we are collecting the Share of Voice for 5 brands in the video streaming industry. HBO boasts 117K mentions so we divide this number by the number of combined mentions of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, and HBO and multiply it by 100. We get HBO's Share of Voice — 9,9% of the total market share.

With Awario's data, you can calculate your Share of Voice both for the share of mentions and your Reach, i.e. the number of impressions.

Step 3. Analyze your prospects in various markets 

In the first step, I mentioned that you can choose countries for which you want to begin calculating your Share of Voice.

For example, you may discover that your product is popular in Poland and decide to leverage your marketing budget there or localize your product for at least some share of Polish audiences. However, this will require a bit more effort on your part. Here's how to calculate the SOV for an individual country if you didn't specify location in the alert setting:

Another data insight you can focus on is the source of mentions. For PR department, this will be especially useful since by limiting sources to new websites you can calculate the SOV for the media. You can specify the sources for the mentions in the Mention Statistics report in the top left corner.

Step 4. Take a close look at social listening reports

When we were discussing the benefits of measuring SOV, we talked about all the insights you can obtain by knowing how to measure Share of Voice with a social listening tool. Now is the time to go to Awario's alert comparison report where you can see:

...for you and your competitors. You can also go through the Mention Statistics report of any competitor and see their key social listening insights based on audiences’ voice analysis.

Step 5. Dive deeper into the online mentions

In addition to social listening analytics, you can also check out the voice of the customer by going through the mentions of your competitors (collecting the Voice of their clients). If you're interested in their weak spots, use filters to see only negative mentions (and negative are mostly met across social media).

To see why some share of your target audience chooses your competitors, do the opposite, and take a look at the positive mentions.

We’ve discussed how to analyze Share of Voice with the help of Awario, now let’s have a look at other tools which can be useful in Share of Voice measurement.

1. Awario

Awario monitors all major social media networks (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit), news, blogs, and the web. The tool determines your brand’s and your competitors’ respective shares of conversation online. After you know the overall Share of Voice for your brand and for competitors’ brands, you can dig deeper and compare the buzz around brands by sentiment, locations, languages, social media sources, and so on. The tool lets you know not only how much people talk about your brand, but also what they say and where they say it.

The same analysis performed for your competitors can reveal some exciting findings: for example, you will know which competitors gather mostly negative comments, which ones are popular only on specific social media networks, and whose popularity is heavily forced by the news sites. 

Awario collects data in real time. This means you can observe how yours and your competitors’ metrics change over time, and how your actions and the actions of your competitors affect your respective shares. 

Awario has three paid plans, so whether you are on a strict budget or not, you’ll find a fitting option. The Share of Voice metric is included in each plan. 

Pricing: $39/mo for the Starter plan, $119/mo for Pro, and $399/mo for Enterprise if billed monthly. Saves you 40% if you choose a yearly plan. Offers a free trial.

2. Brandwatch

 

Brandwatch monitors all major social media networks, most niche social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and the web. If you lack a source, you can add it manually, and Brandwatch will start monitoring it as well. 

Brandwatch is often used for thorough and data-rich competitive research. It doesn’t only show Share of Voice for each brand but also compares them by sentiment (i.e. actual voice), demographics, location, the interests and professions of their audience share. The tool is highly useful if you want to discover more about your competitors’ customers and advocates in various media and see how this knowledge could help you promote your own brand.

Pricing: available upon request.

3. Talkwalker

Talkwalker monitors most social media networks, blogs, news, and the web. It shows Share of Voice and net sentiment for each brand. You can compare the conversations around your brand and competitors by sentiment, engagement, specific topics, locations, languages, social media sources, and so on.

The search is happening in real time, so you can watch your brand’s Share of Voice and related marketing metrics change over time and spot what the changes depend on.

Talkwalker has a free option, Talkwalker Alerts. While Talkwalker Alerts won’t calculate the Share of Voice for you and won’t provide you with any insights into the data, you can still run a search for mentions of your brand and for mentions of your competitors’ brands, and calculate Share of Voice by hand in a separate Excel spreadsheet. Scroll down to the tool number five to find out how.

Pricing: starts at $9,600 per year. Other pricing options are available upon request. 

4. Sprout Social

SproutSocial is a social media management tool with social listening as one of its features. This means SproutSocial covers not only your overall brand awareness but also your advertising efforts. The tool measures Share of Voice on social media, news, blogs, and the web just as other tools on this list, and it also allows you to measure PPC Share of Voice. This makes it one of the best Share of Voice tools. You get a clear understanding of where your brand stands both in terms of its organic reach and share of advertising. You can also compare engagement and analyze the products to discover their own shares.

Pricing:  $89/mo for the Standard plan, $149/mo for Professional, and $249/mo for Advanced if billed annually, each plan will cost $10, $20 and $30 correspondingly if billed monthly. Offers a free 30-day trial.

5. Social Searcher + Spreadsheet

This is a free option for those who don’t want to invest in paid tools. Social Searcher monitors major social networks and the web. The tool will know how to track the mentions of your brand among its sources as soon as you enter the name of your brand in a search bar, and then return a number. You’ll also see a share of authors who’ve supposedly talked about your brand and the brand’s overall sentiment. Save the number of mentions in a Google spreadsheet, and repeat the process for all of your major competitors. Make sure to copy all the results into Excel to save for your reports, as Social Searcher doesn’t save the information. 

Once you’ve collected the data on all of your main competitors, add up the number of mentions for your brand and your competitors’ brands. Divide the number of your mentions by the total number, and turn the fraction into a percentage to get your Share of Voice. Repeat for every competitors’ brand if you’re doing that as a part of competitor research.

You can use this Google spreadsheet to help you with calculation. Simply put down your numbers instead of the numbers in the table.

To sum up

Knowing your Share of Voice will inevitably encourage you to increase it. Awario, Brandwatch, and Talkwalker reveal relevant social media influencers, journalists and bloggers contacting whom can quickly and effectively raise your brand awareness. And, of course, don’t forget that these tools are great for perfecting customer service, as both negative and positive mentions help you improve.