Share of voice (SOV): why and how to measure it?

What is a Share of voice meaning?

Share of voice is often mentioned as one of the most useful social media metrics every marketer should track. But what does the SoV actually mean?

At first, this metric was used to understand the actual market share that your brand has. But now, in the digital era, the concept is attaining more and more meaning, and even differs depending on the field. You can track Share of Voice in the news, social media, digital advertising, website traffic, etc. SoV can also depend on location, industry, and specific market, etc. 

In short, Share of Voice is a metric that helps measure your brand's visibility across different sources and channels compared to your competitors. It gives you a clear understanding of your brand's positions in the digital domain and even across the whole market. 

How to calculate the Share of Voice

There are two main ways to measure your brand visibility on social media and compare it with other market players. 

To know more about your brand's position, you can calculate it by using the formula: 

SOV = the number of your brand mentions/the number of mentions in total x 100%.

However, if you use an automated tool like YouScan to analyze your social media data, you don't need to make these calculations manually for the Share of Voice measurement. The platform is able to do it for you automatically.

As an example, we collected all social media data about the main European supermarket chains to measure their SOVs. Rewe has the most significant share of voice – almost 24% while Lidl is an outsider with only 5% of mentions. 

To learn more about these supermarket chains, read our competitors' analysis.

Share of voice analysis based on social media data helps you to not only see the raw numbers but look deeper into them. For every brand, the number of mentions is important, as well as their sentiment. It's essential to outperform competitors not only by the number of posts but also by the amount of positive feedback. 

Let's look at a quick example. McDonald's has dramatically more social media mentions than Subway. At the same time however, users negatively mention Subway less frequently than Mcdonald's – 9% and 18%, respectively. 

Why is it important to measure SOV in marketing

Being able to understand your share of voice gives you a clear picture of your brand's market position and helps you get insights into your brand and your competitors. 

Below you will find useful types of data you can work with:

• The number of people who know and discuss your brand

• The frequency of discussions compared to your competitors

• Positive and negative feedback, strong and weak sides 

• Top sources of mentions

• Audience insights: demographic data, occupations, and interests of your customers 

There are lots of ways you can use this data. Looking at the strong and weak sides, you can better understand why consumers choose your product or services instead of competitors. For instance, based on YouScan's data, customer service is a weak side of both fast food chains – McDonald's and Subway. At the same time, Subway gets more positive mentions about taste, and users also praise its cleanliness and atmosphere while McDonald's experiences a lack of positive aspects mentioned. 

The best tools to measure the Share of Voice

YouScan

YouScan has excellent coverage that includes around 500K sources and provides its clients with 95% of sentiment accuracy. The main feature that differentiates YouScan from other social media listening tools is its outstanding visual insights analysis capabilities. 

Apart from monitoring text mentions, the platform can detect photos and images with your brand's logos or text in the picture where the relevant to your search query information is placed. Moreover, YouScan has audio recognition as a unique feature.. It can monitor your search query in audio and video content. 

All these capabilities dramatically increase the amount of data you monitor. Being able to collect as much relevant information as possible makes your analysis more precise. Using only YouScan's image recognition, you can increase the amount of data in your mention stream by up to 80%. With audio monitoring, you will get even more mentions. Without these sources, you may get distorted data and, as a result, a distorted view of your Share of Voice and erroneous conclusions. 

Google Ads

If you want to track Share of Voice in advertising, Google Ads can help. The data it shows will always be more relevant than if you take it from third-party tools. 

The actual Share of Voice is represented by the percentage of times the brand was displayed compared to the number of impressions it could have got according to your targeting settings.  

Weighted SOV in advertising  allows you to perform comprehensive calculations for paid ads. With this analysis, you can create better tactics to win bids, evaluate keywords, and analyze relevant competitors to your product and service. Google Ads also helps to see the visibility and ranking of your company compared to other market players. 

SEMrush

Tracking organic traffic is as important as tracking  paid traffic, and for this purpose, there are lots of tools. One of the most effective all-in-one platforms is SEMrush. With its position tracking capabilities, you can measure the Share of Voice of your brand compared to competitors. Moreover, you can analyze data based on different locations and topics, discover new market players and build a strategy to outperform them. 

Using SEMrush’s keyword analysis, you can identify covered and non covered keywords and find a way how you can improve your organic traffic. In the long run, with the right strategy you’ll be able to get more and more leads and cut your budget spent paid searches. 

Share of voice and share of market are closely related concepts that are easy to measure using social media data. SOV gives a clear understanding of your brand's popularity and position. Try YouScan, the social listening platform, and learn how to increase Share of Voice of your products and services.