Social media share of voice can tell you a lot about your industry. This one metric helps businesses to understand how they stack up against their major competitors and identify which strategies and processes have the greatest impact within their industry. Measured over time, it can also help you to pinpoint the key campaigns and PR successes (and disasters) experienced by major players in your industry.
Social media share of voice is a valuable metric that reveals a lot more about your company’s standing within the market than simply measuring ad spend. We compare two methods of measuring share of voice and run through five key insights from social media share of voice.
What is Share of Voice?
Traditionally, and for many years, share of voice was measured exclusively by media spending. To calculate your share of voice the traditional way, you have to divide your total advertising spending and divide it by the sum of all market advertising spending for the same type of product or category. This figure is then converted into a percentage.
There are a couple of problems with this metric. The first is the challenge of getting accurate media spending figures from your competitors. Some SEO tools such as SEMRush and Ahrefs can give you statistics about Google ad and Facebook ad expenditure to help you, but this may not be indicative of their entire media spend.
The second challenge is that expenditure doesn’t necessarily indicate the success of the campaign. It’s not an indicator of brand recognition or customer engagement.
What is Social Media Share of Voice?
Put simply, social media share of voice compares the number of times a brand is mentioned on social media with its main competitors in the industry.
It is a measure of both brand recognition and customer engagement. A higher number of brand mentions indicates that more people have seen the brand online and that more customers engage with its online content.
Unlike more traditional methods of measuring share of voice, social media share of voice can be conducted from readily and freely available content online.
With the help of social media listening tools, such as those developed by us at Symanto, you can crawl the target brand’s social media channels, and those of its competitors to find out who dominates conversation online and to what degree. You can also apply this method to industry forums and news sites.
Why Social Media Share of Voice is Important
1. Assessing the market
Social media share of voice gives you a clear overview of the landscape of your market. Unlike measuring market share, measuring social media share of voice doesn’t require extensive or intrusive competitor intel.
2. Evaluate marketing and product strategies
Did your latest product or latest campaign get people talking? Social media share of voice is a useful KPI metric to help you assess your marketing and product development efforts.
3. Competitor intel
Use social media share of voice in conjunction with traditional share of voice metrics to get further competitor intel. Comparing brand mentions with ad spend can give you some useful intel into the organic growth of a company.
Social listening tools can also help you track the origin of the mentions. This can help you discover the lesser-known influencers and brand ambassadors of your competitors.
4. Brand health
Assess your brand’s reputation online by running sentiment analysis on brand mentions. Find out whether customers generally speak positively or negatively about your brand. This is particularly important in the age of social proof when potential customers increasingly seek out reviews and opinions of existing customers before making a purchase.
Brand sentiment is a useful benchmarking KPI. Track brand mentions over time to pinpoint successful awareness-raising campaigns and activities.
5. Consumer insights
Social listening tools calculate share of voice by analysing real and organic conversations by consumers on social media and review sites. This non-biased feedback is extremely valuable when it comes to consumer insights.
Not only can you get the direct feedback and opinions of your own customers, but those of your competitors too. What’s more the process of collecting and processing social media and review-site data takes a matter of minutes with the help of natural language processing (NLP) and AI technology.
Find out what consumers in the market for your products are saying, and whether there are any niche markets untapped by your competitors.
You can then use this rich information to inform and empower decision making in marketing, branding and product development and innovation.
Get Started With Symanto
Symanto uses cutting edge technology that combines AI, machine learning and advanced natural language processing to crawl and analyse thousands of social media comments and reviews within a matter of minutes.
The Symanto Insights Platform is just one of our solutions that measures brand mentions, consumer sentiment and even consumer psychographics.
To find out more, get in touch, or book your free demonstration today.
