Why Share of Voice Falls Short as a Benchmark
For decades, marketers and PR professionals have relied on Share of Voice (SOV) as the gold standard for measuring success. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s not the comprehensive metric many believe it to be.
Share of Voice—the percentage of media coverage or conversations your brand commands compared to competitors—often creates a false sense of achievement. A high SOV might look impressive in presentations, but it tells you little about actual business impact or audience engagement.
PR teams and marketers who benchmark success solely on SOV are missing the forest for the trees. Instead, focus should shift to metrics that truly matter (e.g., article readership):
- Article readership and engagement: How many people actually consumed the content where your brand appeared? Did they engage with it?
- Context and quality of coverage: A negative mention in a high-profile publication may boost SOV while damaging your brand.
- Narrative effectiveness: Are the key messages and stories you want to tell actually coming through in the coverage you receive?
These factors provide much deeper insights into whether your communications strategy is working in meaningful ways.
Reframing Share of Voice: A Measure of Relevance
While SOV shouldn’t be your north star metric, it does serve an important purpose when viewed through the right lens. Rather than seeing it as a success metric, consider Share of Voice as a relevance indicator.
SOV effectively measures how present your brand is in important conversations. It reflects:
- Media interest: How often journalists and publications feel your brand is worth mentioning
- Search demand: The volume of people actively seeking information about your products or services
- Audience conversations: How frequently your brand enters organic discussions among your target demographic
When framed this way, Share of Voice becomes a useful barometer of your brand’s cultural and market relevance—an important factor in long-term business success, but not the only one worth tracking.
How to Calculate Share of Voice (SOV)
There’s no single “correct” method for calculating share of voice. Your approach depends on your data sources, measurement objectives, and how you choose to weigh different results. At its core, SOV is just math—counting the number of mentions your brand receives relative to competitors.
Let’s break down the key components for effectively measuring share of voice:
1. Data Sources: Where Are You Tracking Mentions?
The first critical decision is determining which platforms to monitor:
- Traditional Media: Count articles published in newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media that mention your company or products over a set timeframe.
- Social Media: Track mentions across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and other relevant platforms.
- Reddit: Monitor conversations in specific subreddits where your target audience gathers.
2. Refining Traditional Media Metrics
Even within traditional media, you can further refine your approach:
- Target Media List: Focus only on coverage from a predetermined list of important publications (e.g., top 50 business media, 10 tech publications, 25 trade outlets). This approach ignores mentions from sources not on your target list.
- Relevance Filtering: Measure SOV by focusing on mentions from publications that align with your business model (B2B vs. consumer publications).
- Authority Weighting: Assign different values to mentions based on the publication’s and author’s authority. An analyst mentioned in The Wall Street Journal carries more weight than a mention on a non-expert’s blog.
3. Qualitative Distinctions in Mentions
Not all mentions deliver equal impact. Consider segmenting your data by:
- Headline Mentions: Count instances where your brand appears in article headlines (typically more valuable than body mentions).
- Media Engagement: Measure the total engagements (shares, likes, comments) generated by media coverage.
- Publication Reach: Calculate the collective reach of publications covering your brand (often measured as unique visitors per month).
- Unique Mentions: Track mentions that reference only your brand, whether in headlines or article body.
4. Establishing Consistent Parameters
For meaningful SOV calculation, maintain consistency in:
- Time Period: Determine whether you’ll track monthly, quarterly, or yearly mentions based on what makes sense for your business cycle.
- Competitor Selection: Identify actual market competitors rather than simply including all companies in your industry.
- Measurement Formula: Apply the same calculation methodology across all brands being compared to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison.
Types of Share of Voice Analysis
Share of voice isn’t a one-size-fits-all metric. Depending on your business goals and channels, you’ll want to analyze different types of SOV. Use the decision tree below to determine which approach might be best for your specific needs:
Let’s explore these variations in more detail:
Social Media Share of Voice
Tracking SOV on social media follows similar principles to traditional media monitoring measurement. Using tools like Talkwalker, you can:
- Create Boolean search queries for your brand and competitors
- Select relevant platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube for B2B; Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat for consumer brands)
- Set your date range and analyze results
((remote OR hybrid OR flex* OR “future of” OR digital) ONEAR/3 (work* OR team* OR office)) OR (#digitalworkplace OR #digitalworkforce OR #futureofwork)
Remember that pure mention counts don’t tell the complete story. Consider these additional factors:
- Authority weighting: A mention from an industry influencer or journalist carries more impact than one from a random account
- Engagement metrics: Incorporate likes, shares, comments, and retweets to measure resonance, not just reach
- Platform relevance: Focus on platforms where your target audience actively engages
Topical Share of Voice
Rather than tracking overall brand mentions, topical SOV measures how your brand performs within specific industry conversations:
- Build comprehensive Boolean queries around relevant topics (e.g., “Remote Work” for collaboration software companies)
- Compare your brand’s presence within these topical conversations against competitors
- Provide proper context when reporting—clarify whether you’re measuring against direct competitors or the entire industry conversation
Audience Share of Voice
This advanced approach focuses on how well your brand resonates with specific audience segments:
- Conduct social media audience analysis to identify target profiles (e.g., CIOs for a B2B tech company)
- Create brand and competitive Boolean filters to isolate mentions from this audience
- Calculate your SOV percentage within this specific audience
This approach is particularly actionable, as it helps you understand performance among the exact audiences you’re targeting with content and paid social campaigns.
Platform-Specific SOV: Reddit Example
Reddit offers unique SOV insights because of its structure into topic-specific subreddits. Using tools like Brandwatch, you can:
- Track brand mentions within relevant subreddits
- Compare discussion volume against competitors
- Gain qualitative insights from these highly engaged communities
SEO Share of Voice
From an SEO perspective, SOV measures your brand’s visibility in organic search results. There are three main approaches:
- Site-level SOV: Compare your site’s organic traffic volume against competitors using tools like Semrush or Moz
- Keyword-level SOV: Calculate the percentage of target keywords for which your site ranks compared to competitors
- Search volume SOV: Analyze the search volume for branded terms (e.g., “Amazon online shopping” vs. “Walmart online shopping”)
Remember that SEO SOV is influenced by many variables, including offline marketing, PR coverage, paid search, and other digital activities.
Advertising Share of Voice
Advertising SOV (ASOV) measures your brand’s proportion of total advertising spend in your category. You can calculate it by:
- Dividing your total advertising spend by the category’s total spend
- Analyzing spend by specific media channels
- Comparing impression share across digital advertising platforms
Marketers use ASOV to benchmark competitive advertising intensity and inform budget allocation decisions across channels.
Comparing Share of Voice Measurement Approaches
To help you decide which SOV measurement approach makes sense for your organization, here’s a comparison of the different methodologies:
| SOV Type | Key Metrics | Tools | Advantages | Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Media | Article mentions, headline appearances, publication reach | Cision, Meltwater, Signal AI | Established credibility, high authority | More difficult to quantify impact, slower reporting cycle |
| Social Media | Mentions, engagement, authority weighting | Talkwalker, Brandwatch | Real-time insights, engagement metrics, audience segmentation | Platform algorithm changes, difficult to filter noise |
| Topical | Conversation relevance, topic association | Talkwalker, Brandwatch | Industry context, narrative positioning | Requires careful query construction, can miss tangential mentions |
| Audience | Targeted segment mentions, resonance with specific groups | Talkwalker, Brandwatch | Highly targeted, actionable insights | Complex setup, smaller sample sizes |
| Subreddit mentions, comment volume, vote metrics | Talkwalker, Brandwatch | Xonversations, passionate communities | Platform-specific, demographic limitations | |
| SEO | Organic traffic, keyword rankings, search visibility | Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs | Direct connection to web traffic, purchase intent indicators | Algorithm changes, technical complexity |
| Advertising | Ad spend proportion, impression share, media mix | Media planning tools, ad platforms | Budget benchmarking, competitive measure | Cost doesn’t equal effectiveness, platform limitations |
The Strategic Value of Share of Voice Measurement
The evolution of Share of Voice represents a microcosm of marketing’s broader transformation. While previous generations of marketers could rely on simple volume metrics to gauge success, today’s complex, fragmented media landscape demands more nuanced approaches.
The most sophisticated organizations now recognize that SOV isn’t just about tracking mentions—it’s about understanding market position and anticipating shifts in competitive dynamics. When properly contextualized, Share of Voice becomes a leading indicator that can inform everything from product development to investment decisions.
This shift requires breaking down organizational silos. Too often, SOV data remains trapped in PR departments when it should be informing C-suite strategy. Marketing leaders who successfully elevate SOV from a tactical reporting metric to a strategic intelligence tool gain a competitive advantage by spotting emerging trends before they become obvious.
The blind spot for many brands isn’t the measurement itself but the interpretation and action. A decreasing share of voice or share of media coverage might indicate a need to boost media spend—or it might signal that competitors are pursuing innovation paths that make your messaging increasingly irrelevant. Without proper analysis and cross-functional collaboration, these critical insights remain undiscovered.
As we move into an AI-driven communication landscape, organizations that treat SOV as merely a vanity metric will find themselves increasingly disadvantaged against those who use it as a dynamic input for strategic decision-making. The question isn’t whether to measure Share of Voice—it’s whether you’re extracting its full strategic value.
