Sarah Maher June 30, 2021 Social media has become an increasingly competitive space over the past few years, and captivating your audience’s attention while stirring conversations around your brand can be more difficult than ever. While considering social media for your company, it’s important to ask yourself, “Is my company seen as an industry leader?” If you’re unsure of the answer, measuring your social media share of voice will help.
Tracking your share of voice on social media is helpful for both comparing your performance to competitors and creating a reflection of your social media marketing efforts. Discover areas where you’re lagging, and take into consideration what your audience is saying about you versus other similar companies.
In this post, find out what exactly share of voice is, why it’s important to measure your share of voice, and how to measure share of voice on social media.
What Is Share of Voice?
Share of voice (SOV) is a marketing metric comparing brand awareness and customer engagement against your competitors. Simply put, this measurement will show how much you influence conversation within your industry.
Historically, SOV was primarily used to measure share on paid advertising. In paid advertising, this measurement represents your brand’s share of ad space compared to the total market advertising space available. Nowadays, as mentioned above, SOV has a broader use, encompassing many aspects of digital marketing including social media.
With a variety of social listening tools available, you can easily track what people are saying about your brand, hashtags, reach, impressions, and more.
The Importance of Tracking SOV
By monitoring your SOV, your company will gain insight into your current position in the market. Stay up to date with challenges and opportunities for growth by looking at the following metrics.
Competitors
Social share of voice allows you to see new competitors and calculate their SOV compared to yours. Identify competitors in your industry, and take a look at areas they do well to find room for improvement in your own social strategy.
Audience Engagement
Solidify your brand voice by interacting with your audience. Tracking topic and sentiment insights can drive your content and engagement plan.
Budgets
After running social campaigns, tracking SOV can identify which channels you should be spending your social dollars on. If you buzzed conversation on LinkedIn while Facebook was on the quieter side, you’ll know where to focus your efforts on the next campaign.
4 Tips for Measuring Share of Voice on Social Media
You can calculate social share of voice in two ways: manually or with a paid social media listening tool. Regardless of how you decide to track SOV, the basic formula is:
Total Industry Mentions ÷ Your Brand Mentions x 100 = Social Share of Voice
Here are tips you can easily incorporate into your strategy to measure your share of voice:
1. Monitor Your Audience’s Voice
Beginning to collect a general share of voice is a great place to start. You can use internal analytics tools such as Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics, and so forth. Compile your findings by channel in an Excel sheet, and then do the same for competitors. This comparison will provide an overview of how your customers perceive you versus other brands.
2. Identify Engagement
Identifying what your audience is saying about your brand not only shows your customers you’re listening to them, but it’s also a great way to address questions or issues. Over time, your audience will notice you are actively communicating with them, which will lead to a higher percentage of brand mentions as the conversation continues.
3. Segment Your Mentions
Start by collecting all of your mentions. Once you have this data, try looking at a variety of segments such as demographics, age, gender, or location. For example, you might find your brand has a large social share of voice with ages 25-40 that your competitors do not. Take this new insight as an advantage, and begin incorporating it into your strategies and engagement.
4. Paid Social Listening Tools
The simplest method of measuring share of voice on social media is utilizing a paid social listening tool such as Brand24 or Hootsuite. These tools allow you to easily create social listening alerts to monitor keywords and brand mentions for your own company and competitors.
Conquer Social Media SOV and Influence Your Industry
Hopefully you gained some insight on why you should be tracking your social share of voice and some new ideas on how to approach measuring this data. The more you are able to report and act on your share of voice, the more you will be seen as an industry influencer.
Digital marketing can be tricky, and it’s time-consuming to stay up to date as its tactics are ever-evolving. For more tips like these on all things digital marketing, check out Your Inbound Marketing Playbook for 2020 and Beyond.
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