Most social media professionals lean towards impressions, reach, followers, and engagement as their go-to metrics for social media performance. These are all great for measuring your own content but when it comes to measuring yourself against competitors or industry colleagues, is crucial to understand share of voice (SOV).
What is Share of Voice?
Share of voice is traditionally considered to measure a brand’s ad spend versus the total category competitor ad spend. For social media, it works as the number of public brand mentions versus the total number of competitor mentions. Remember that you must gather both during the same time frame.
The easiest and best way to calculate the social share of voice is through a social listening or social intelligence tool. In my case, working for Florida International University, I have access to Talkwalker, a social listening platform that monitors public social media mentions. I’ve built a share of voice dashboard to monitor mentions of Florida’s largest public universities. Each university monitor is looking for a full name (Florida International University), abbreviated (FIU), and social handles (@fiuinstagram).
What does Share of Voice tell me?
The graph above shows that for June 2022, UCF and FSU had the two largest SOV. This dominance is due to extensive news coverage of football teams changing conferences. Social media SOV will vary throughout the year due to news and seasonality. SOV will tell you which competitors are getting spoken about the most and why. This, in turn, will give you insight into what topics and themes are of public interest and, in some cases, provide content ideas.
The Full Picture
Beware that social listening tools don’t paint the full picture. It can find trends and common themes, but these tools, at the time of this writing, do not pull data from TikTok or Instagram Reels, where a lot of engagement is currently happening. Consider social SOV a barometer to know higher-level trends, but it is not the full picture.
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